Reading My Brother's Books

Toward the end of The End of the Affair by Graham Greene, the narrator, Maurice Bendrix, comes across a pile of old children's books that once belonged to Sarah, his dead lover. Maurice is now living in Sarah's old house with her husband Henry, the man Maurice and Sarah had been deceiving during their affair (it's a long story), which gives him time to rummage at leisure through her fairy books by Andrew Lang, "many Beatrix Potters," and several others. In one Beatrix Potter book Sarah had written her name in pencil. In another she had written "Sarah Bertram Her Book. Please ask permission to borrow. And if you steal it will be to your sorrow." These, reflects Maurice, "were the marks of every child who has ever lived: traces as anonymous as the claw marks of birds that one sees in winter. When I closed the book they were covered at once by the drift of time."

A few pages later Maurice encounters another of Sarah's old books. This one had been given to Parkis, a detective whom Maurice had employed to spy on Sarah and whose son had developed an attachment to the woman they were following (it's a long story). Parkis has returned the book, an Andrew Lang fairy book, because it was exciting his son. The son had taken ill with a mysterious fever and stomachache; when the ailment cleared up as mysteriously as it had arisen, the son said that it was the deceased Sarah who had come to take away the pain. He read in her book something Sarah had written as a girl - "When I was ill my mother gave me this book by Lang. / If any well person steals it he will get a great bang, / But if you are sick in bed / You can have it to read instead" - and believed that Sarah's ghost had written it just for him, to make him better. Maurice, a rationalist and atheist, dismisses the story as a mere "coincidence," but the coincidences have begun to pile up. An atheist friend of Sarah's has seen his facial deformity disappear. Sarah's mother has revealed that Sarah had been baptized a Catholic as a young girl, and a priest has insisted that the adult Sarah, ostensibly an atheist, was starting to become interested in Catholicism before she died. A true believer would see all these coincidences as little miracles, or at least as evidence that Sarah was still operating in the lives of those she'd left behind, but Maurice tries to resist the idea.

Nevertheless, by the end of the book he's begun to question his atheism. He's arguing with God like this:

You've taken her, but you haven't got me yet. I know Your cunning. It's You who take us up to a high place and offer us the whole universe. You're a devil, God, tempting us to leap. But I don't want Your peace and I don't want Your love. I wanted something very simple: I wanted Sarah for a lifetime and You took her away. With Your great schemes You ruin our happiness like a harvester ruins a mouse's nest. I hate You, God. I hate You as though You existed.

That last bit is quite brilliant, and it reminds me of the opening line of Julian Barnes's Nothing to be Frightened Of (about which which I've written previously): "I don't believe in God, but I miss Him." By the final paragraph Maurice hasn't abandoned his atheism exactly, but he can't shake the sense that Sarah's spirit is still alive in the world. The book ends with this prayer: "O God, You've done enough, You've robbed me enough, I'm too tired and old to learn to love, leave me alone forever." And when he says that, we know that he'll continue to be visited by Sarah, and perhaps by God, for the rest of his life.

I read all this in Joey's copy of The End of the Affair, which I fetched, along with several of his other books, from our mother's attic last year. Unlike Sarah's books it contains no inscription, but it is yellowed and creased like many books that had the misfortune to be used (I almost said abused) by my brother, who was famously careless with his possessions (as anyone familiar with the long, sad demise of his Honda Accord will tell you), so it's kind of like it's inscribed. How it got this way I will never know. Stuffed into a backpack and crumpled under larger, stronger books? Spilled from a suitcase or a duffel bag and then trampled as it lay under scattered clothes? Forgotten in a car seat and kicked by heedless passengers? His copy of Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, which I "borrowed" from his shelves years ago, is in a similar state, as is his copy of Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, which I also have. In the attic I also found a signed first edition of Michael Chabon's The Mysteries of Pittsburgh with substantial water damage that almost certainly appeared after the book sold for $20, the price marked in pencil on the first page. In one of the other, as yet unplundered boxes in our mother's attic, I know there sits a ridiculously mangled copy of David Foster Wallace's gargantuan Infinite Jest, which I spotted on Joey's bedside table a long time ago. One day I'll get it out of the attic and stick it in our fiction section, where it will sit unread until some curious visitor grabs it, notes its well-used condition, and flatters us by assuming that either Kate or I must have read the thing (and then perhaps dragged it several miles down a dusty country road).

Not all of Joey's books are in serious-to-critical condition, of course. I retrieved several pristine first editions of books by people like Steinbeck and Hemingway from the attic, books that must have been gifts (probably from our father) and that Joey almost certainly hadn't yet read. I retrieved a good academic edition of Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier (which I know Joey read and loved), a nice 1940s hardcover of Ulysses, an only slightly tattered The Moviegoer, a couple of decent Waughs, and a nice, big edition of a William Faulkner biography with a bookmark halfway through and a packet of photographs stuck under the back cover (showing, I gather, scenes from a trip my father made to visit him at the University of Virginia). There is also, speaking of UVA, an unread copy of Poker Wisdom of a Champion by Doyle Brunson, a gift Joey received probably because of the author's name, not because he had any special interest in poker. Inside is a card dated April 23, 2004. It says: "Dear Joe, This past semester I knew I could always count on you - no matter if you were busy or had a class, and for that I am very grateful. Thank you for always helping me when I needed you. Sincerely, Peter." (I don't know who Peter is - maybe one of you UVA folks knows?) There is also a book by Martin Hauan, in a plastic cover, called He Buys Organs for Churches, Pianos for Bawdy Houses. Inside is an inscription from Martin Hauan himself, which reads, "From one student of Oklahoma's politics to another. Best to you always." I doubt this inscription was for Joey - the internet tells me Hauan died in 2001, and Joey did not really become involved in Oklahoma politics until 2004 (when he worked on the campaign of a Democrat running for US Senate) - but I'm sure there's a story behind this book, which has a bookmark from the Full Circle Bookstore at the end of the first chapter, showing that Joey at least made an attempt to read it.

In every book I have that belonged to Joey I have installed either a bookplate that says "From the Library of Joseph P. Doyle" (Tina gave these to him; he never decided which books he wanted to put them in) or a Snoopy sticker (which Tina has also put into the books of his that she has). These books sit on our shelves, snuggled up with our own books like good friends. I like the idea that as our children grow and begin exploring our collection (we will require all of our children, however many there will be, to be avid readers), they will be able to know at a glance which books belonged to their Uncle Joey. They, like we, won't really know which ones he read and what he thought of them if he did, but I will be able to assure them that the bruised and battered ones, the End of the Affairs and the Infinite Jests, were indeed well-used.

As for the The End of the Affair itself, I know that Joey really liked it. He mentioned it to me more than once when Graham Greene came up in our conversations (which he did more than you might expect), but what exactly he liked about it - whether he enjoyed its subtle affirmation of Catholicism (if, indeed, Joey was a true-believing Catholic), its evocation of London during the Blitz, the caustic narrator, the comic private eye, or the way it dissects the intertwining nature of love and hate - either he didn't say or I have forgotten. I do know roughly when and where he bought it: the Borders on Northwest Expressway, in Oklahoma City, within roughly a year of May 7, 1999 (as a former Borders employee, I have the power of deciphering the stickers they put on the back of their books). That means he probably read it at the age of eighteen or nineteen, most likely during a summer at home, either before or after his first year of college. A book like that, with its weighty themes and big, unanswered questions, can mean a lot to a kid that age.

Everything that I've just said adds up to the strongest possible argument against e-readers that I can imagine. Everything that I've just said would be impossible to say or to know if my brother had done most of his reading on a digital device where words have no more permanence than they do in an email inbox or a facebook feed. And yes, I recognize the irony of my saying this in a blog, and no, it doesn't bother me one bit. By all means, folks, use your Nindles and Kooks or whatever as much as you want, but for the sake of those who come after you - indeed, for the sake of those who come alongside you - buy and read lots of real books, too. Bend them, crease them, circle passages you love, put stickers in them, forget them in the back of your car, drop them in dirty puddles, abuse them ruthlessly - even the ones you love - especially the ones you love - and then put them somewhere they can be found by someone who might care that you once held them in your hands, who might treasure even the stains from your greasy fingers, and who will wonder what you made of the words inside.

My brother's books are among the most direct links I have to the life he lived and the thoughts he thought. I could have read The End of the Affair on my phone, I suppose, but then I wouldn't have gotten the chill that I got when I read the part about Sarah's old books and the way she seemed to be still alive in them. I've often written here about the coincidences - or, if you prefer, the small miracles - that have happened from time to time since Joey's death. This was a big one, and, like the others, it made me feel a little less lonely and a little more open to the possibility that we don't really disappear when we die.

Green Shoots

Two and a half weeks ago we had a daughter, Rose Elizabeth, born a few days after her due date and after a spell in the hospital during which she exhibited no great urgency to sally forth into the world. In this she somewhat resembled her absent Uncle Joey, who sometimes needed a cattle prod to get going but, once underway, could thrash through the world like a newborn, or at least like someone to whom all things were new.

Rose is an incredible creature, all squirms and appetites and growth, and it hardly seems possible that Kate and I alone should be entrusted with the responsibility of keeping her safe and fed. She is also, now that she's out, a completely separate creature from either of us - absolutely dependent on us though she is, her little growing mind and body are now all her own, and the path she follows from now on, and what she thinks about it all, will be hers alone. 

When we lost Joey, we lost a world. His consciousness and all that it contained - that little spark behind his eyes that held all of his thoughts and experiences and dreams and doubts - vanished utterly. Like archaeologists excavating a buried city, all we have are traces of that world from which to piece together a partial picture. But by creating Rose, we have created a new world - one to which we likewise only have indirect access, but that we know is churning and expanding nonetheless. That doesn't mean that her presence somehow makes up for Joey's absence - in some ways it makes his absence more glaring - but it does serve as a reminder that death has its counterpart in birth, that new plants grow from soil fertilized by those who have come before.

That image - of life growing out of death - is one of the recurring motifs in Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass. When not swaying with Rose or photographing Rose or feeding Rose (and sometimes while feeding Rose) I've been reading Justin Kaplan's biography of Whitman, the contribution of my father-in-law David to last Christmas's book swap. It's a luminous and tender biography of a man that I really didn't know much about, despite having borrowed one of his poems for the title and spirit of this blog. Among the biography's virtues is that it spends as much time illuminating the meanings of his art as it does narrating the events of his life; it's a bit like taking a poetry seminar with an unusually erudite professor. Kaplan identifies many animating ideas in Whitman's poetry (urban life, democracy, love of all sorts), but one of the most powerful and persistent is summarized in the image of grass growing from the grave. This is from "Song of Myself":

Tenderly will I use you curling grass,
It may be you transpire from the breasts of young men,
It may be if I had known them I would have loved them,
It may be you are from old people, or from offspring taken soon out of their mothers’ laps,
And here you are the mothers’ laps.

And then, a few lines later:

What do you think has become of the young and old men?
And what do you think has become of the women and children?
They are alive and well somewhere,
The smallest sprout shows there is really no death,
And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it,
And ceas’d the moment life appear’d.

All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.

Has any one supposed it lucky to be born?
I hasten to inform him or her it is just as lucky to die, and I know it.

The eponymous leaves of grass, then, are those which are found in a graveyard. They begin as the smallest of sprouts, and they are nourished by the dead. As Kaplan says, Whitman saw "the earth as a vast compost heap and life as the rich leavings of many deaths." Here's another statement of the same idea:

I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,
If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.

And so this is what I think about as I watch my daughter sleep and listen to her cry: in all sorts of ways her life will be nurtured by the life that has disappeared. She is a sprout (though not the only sprout) growing out of what remains of my brother's brief existence on Earth.

Rose is a fortunate baby. There is a great crowd of people out in the world just waiting to help her grow, to ply her with books and toys, to squeeze her cheeks and calm her sobs. That crowd is precisely one individual smaller than it should be, but she'll feel his presence nonetheless. Uncle Joey will show up in her grandparents' love and in her father's tenderness, when her father manages to be tender. He will show up in the home that her parents will make for her, which will be full of stories about him and books that belonged to him and music that he loved. He will accompany her on family road trips. He will bequeath to her, I hope, a love of travel and a restless curiosity about the world.

Whitman's poetry is famous for its gusto, for its delight in the sensuous, earthy pleasures of the body and of American life. Joey was a bit like that, and I hope Rose will be, too. Like Whitman, Joey was a big, gentle guy whose social self did not always match his exuberant private self. After one of his famous rambles through New York City, Whitman said, "Wasn't it brave! And didn't we laugh (not outwardly - that would have been vulgar; but in the inward soul's bedchamber) with the very excess of delight and gladness? O, it is a beautiful world we live in, after all!" Joey could almost have written that himself, especially the bit about vulgarity. Also like Joey, Whitman could be a lethargic fellow; he once claimed it was a family trait "to tide over, to lay back on reserves, to wait, to take time." Joey would have fit right in with the Whitmans in this respect; it remains to be seen whether Rose will show a similar set of inclinations, but if her lackadaisical entry into the world is any indication, this seems likely.

I want to be sure I'm making myself clear. I do not expect Rose to resemble Joey in any significant way, nor do I especially want her to. She is not a replacement for my brother or some kind of compensation for his loss. She must not be burdened by his memory, expected to live up to him, or come to resent him (or me) because she's had to grow up in his shadow. She must and will be her own person. But the world she lives in - the air she breathes and the food she eats (especially if that food is listed in the Roadfood guide) - will have an unmistakable Joey flavor. And as long as she loves her life as much as Joey loved his, it matters not one bit whether she resembles him in any other respects.

In the preface to the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass, Whitman offered his readers some fatherly advice. It's the kind of thing Joey might have told her someday - not in so many words (there are way too many words here for Joey), but in spirit and by example.

This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air each season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.

It's good advice; with a little help, I bet we can plant at least some of these ideas in Rose's little brain.

From Hitch to Eternity

This past Christmas, like the Christmas before, we held a book swap in Joey's honor. Friends and relatives from around the country submitted books that we associated with Joey or that we thought he might like, and a few of us gathered in my grandmother's living room in Oklahoma to swap the books and tell stories. As with the previous year, the assortment of books was pretty diverse - they ranged from Larry McMurtry and Annie Proulx to E. Nesbitt and PG Wodehouse - and together they formed a touching, and quite accurate, picture of the world that Joey inhabited. There were funny books and English books and really quite formidable books, the sorts of books you'd read on a dare: a 500-page travelogue (Blue Highways), an omnibus collection of short novels (the Wodehouse), a biography of Walt Whitman, a collection of Twain essays.

I don't know for sure, but I believe my contribution may have been the most formidable of all. Arguably, by Christopher Hitchens, runs to over 700 pages and is roughly the size and heft of a newborn. It's a collection of Hitchens' best essays on political, literary, and cultural matters. The range of topics is truly Joey-like in its scope and sweep, with a particular focus on British novelists of the twentieth century (Orwell, Wodehouse, Waugh, Maugham, Greene, Ballard), political conflicts and personages (Jefferson, Lincoln, etc), tendentious pieces propounding outlandish positions for the sheer contrarian joy of it (e.g., "Why Women Aren't Funny"), and a handful of pieces about what it means to live the good life ("Wine Drinkers of the World, Unite"). Joey undoubtedly read many of these essays in the Atlantic or Slate, but I would have given him the book anyway, so that he could catch the ones he'd missed. Although he certainly didn't agree with Hitchens about everything, I know he admired him. He may even have run into him a time or two in Washington, DC. The last time I was in Washington with Joey I kept saying to him, while we were walking down the street, "Hey, is that Christopher Hitchens?" Eventually he grew impatient with me and said, "You just think every guy with long hair is Christopher Hitchens," which was true.

Whether they ever bumped into one another or not, the Washington Joey inhabited was quite similar to the one in which Hitchens lived. Theirs was the Washington of bookstores and good restaurants and classy-but-shabby bars, not the Washington of lobbyists and politicians and interns and television reporters. They were intellectuals in a city of soundbites, realists in a city of idealists, connoisseurs in a city of philistines, and readers of large books in a city famous for its short attention spans. Am I being too hard on Washington? I probably am. What I mean to say is that both men simultaneously thrived on the city's energy - its built-in cosmopolitanism, its grandeur and pretensions, its many secret nooks of power and influence - and conducted their lives in ways that were slightly at odds with the city's dominant ethos. When they were alive you could be sure that at least someone in Washington had read Tolstoy or heard of Samuel Johnson, and that was somehow reassuring.

If their tastes were rather similar, however, I don't think their personalities were. Hitchens was a famed conversationalist and a man of unbounded energy (there's a reason why his "best-of" collection of essays is over 700 pages long) who continued to write and read prodigiously right through his final illness. Joey was quiet, parsimonious with his energy, and uneasy in the spotlight (unless it happened to be karaoke night and they happened to have some Johnny Cash songs). Nevertheless, I like to think of the two of them chatting away in some book-lined afterlife, staying up way too late and drinking way too much whisky, energetically debating the affinities between, say, Oscar Wilde and Elmer Fudd. I think they would crack each other up.

Recently the Atlantic (to which we were given a gift subscription by David, my father-in-law, who also happened to get the Hitchens book in the swap) published the essay on which Hitchens was working when he died. It's about the British novelist G.K. Chesterton, who is not much read these days (apart, perhaps, from his Father Brown mystery series) but who was among the most prolific and influential writers of the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It's typical of Hitchens' later essays in that it's a little less barbed, and a little less coherent, than his best stuff, but that's certainly understandable. The man was dying of cancer, after all, and here he was writing a long essay on a half-forgotten (and by Hitchens not much admired) British writer. Still, it's an erudite and incisive exploration of the moral world that Chesterton inhabited, and it's well worth a read if you have the time and patience. Joey had read at least one Chesterton novel, The Napoleon of Notting Hill, but he didn't much care for it. He read it on my recommendation, actually, but, since I hadn't read it myself (and still haven't), I concede that it was rather an irresponsible recommendation. As I understand it, thar book is about a civil war that erupts in London, pitting the various neighborhoods (the East End, Chelsea, Southwark, etc) against one another. I liked the idea and thought I'd write a similar novel about Boston one day, but the sense that I got from Joey was that, as with much speculative fiction, the idea was rather more interesting than the execution.

Anyway, Chesterton is not the point here. The point is that along with Hitchens' essay the Atlantic printed a short remembrance of Hitchens by Benjamin Schwarz, the editor who'd worked with Hitchens on the Chesterton thing. Schwarz says that the last gift he gave to Hitchens as he was entering the hospital was a collection of Orwell's essays in which Schwarz had inscribed his favorite Orwell line: "One is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one's love upon other human individuals." It's a touching, if somewhat gloomy, sentiment; it gives us permission to go on caring about people despite the risks, and that's a pretty good way to be. I suspect Hitchens, who admired Orwell immoderately (he even wrote a book called Why Orwell Matters) may nevertheless have thought the quote a tad sentimental, but I think Joey (who also quite liked Orwell) would surely have agreed with it wholeheartedly.

And then there's me. Kate and I, as you may know, have for the last several months been creating a brand new "human individual" of our own (although I do believe Kate's doing most of the work), someone to whom we expect to fasten quite a bit of our love. It's exciting, of course, but it's also terrifying, and not just in the way that becoming a new parent is always terrifying. The past few years have instilled in me a very keen sense of the fragility of life and have left me more-or-less permanently braced for disaster, so as I inch toward fatherhood I find that I'm carrying more than the usual bundle of fears and anxieties. But when it comes to fastening my love upon other human individuals, I just don't see that I have any choice in the matter: if life really is as fragile as I think it is (and it is), and if catastrophe really can strike at any moment (and it can), then what the hell's the point of withholding one iota of love (or joy, or humor, or sympathy, or understanding) from my loved ones even for a moment? Carpe diem and all that, right? Or, in this case, carpe baby.

In Praise of Silly

I'm sure I'm not the first person to make this comparison, but I'll make it anyway: grief is like tinnitus, or anyway my grief, in its current advanced state, is like tinnitus. I always hear it, day after day, just ringing away at the same pitch and volume. What changes is the attention I pay to it - loud noises or interesting conversations will distract me momentarily, but as soon as they recede, there's that ringing again. So persistent is it, and so loud, that most of the time it just sort of blends in with the other sounds of the world, as if it's become a part of the world. It rings through every song I hear on the radio, through every thought that drifts through my brain; it doesn't ruin the songs or the thoughts, but it does make them sound different.

Another comparison: grief is like a pair of sunglasses. You can still see shapes, objects, and movement through it, you can still read a book (in bright sunlight) or watch a (brightly colored) movie, but the world as you see it is not as it really is. The colors aren't necessarily darker (for a time in high school I wore these purple John Lennon sunglasses that actually made most colors more vibrant, especially reds), but they're often muddier or less distinct. After a while, you might even forget that you're wearing your grief-sunglasses, but then you walk into an empty, darkened room, and you remember. It's especially noticeable at night.

Speaking of high school: when I was a teenager I wore this black t-shirt with an Edgar Allen Poe quote on it that went, "There are moments when, even to the sober eye of reason, the world of our sad humanity may assume the semblance of a hell." There was no image or pattern on the shirt, just white letters on black cotton. I loved that shirt, and I loved the quote, not because I was especially morose or dark (although what teenager is not sometimes morose and dark?), but because of the convoluted, and, to my unformed mind, sophisticated way it expressed what was really a rather banal sentiment. I cherished that phrase the way teenagers cherish favorite poems and song lyrics. I wrote it on notebooks, chalkboards, and several yearbook pages. I think I thought it made me sound mysterious and interesting, although I now realize that I was lucky it never came to the attention of an overzealous guidance counselor, to whom it might make me sound troubled or homicidal. However - and this is my point - now that I've had some experience of tragedy and grief, the sentiment behind the quote, and, more importantly, the sentiment behind my fixation on the quote, seem utterly irrelevant to the actual condition of grief. Grief does not make the world of our sad humanity assume the semblance of a hell; it may make it assume the semblance of a funhouse mirror or an underwater city or a vaseline-smeared window, but not a hell.

Depression, now depression is another thing entirely, I gather. A couple of months ago Kate and I went to see the movie Melancholia, in which a depressed Kirsten Dunst accepts the impending end of the world (a wayward planet is about to collide with Earth) with something like approval. Her sister, Charlotte Gainsbourg, has a young son, and therefore a reason to live, and so she doesn't want the world to end at all, but for Kirsten Dunst human beings (including herself) are horrible and destructive creatures, and they deserve to perish. I suppose I can understand a depressed person feeling that way, but I, a bereaved person, spent the bulk of the movie in a state of heart-racing anxiety because I emphatically did not want the world to end. I guess I'm willing to endure the ringing in my ears as long as I'm still able to hear some music playing over it.

I haven't bothered much with quotes since becoming an adult, but I recently came across something I quite like. Humphrey Lyttleton was a British jazz trumpeter who, in addition to helping lead a jazz revival in post-WWII Britain, was, after 1972, the host of a much-loved BBC radio comedy show called I Haven't A Clue. The show was a sort of quiz show in which a panel of comedians played games and said silly things like, ""Hello and welcome to I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue. Tonight, we promise you a nail-biting contest. Which will be followed by a nose-picking contest." (That's not the quote I have in mind.) One of the games was called Mornington Crescent, which was a fake strategy game that required panelists to name a series of landmarks or stops on the London Tube, proceeding by a complicated (and ever-changing) set of rules toward the Mornington Crescent stop; the first person to announce "Mornington Crescent!" won the game. Of course there were no actual rules to the game: the whole thing was just an exercise in anarchic silliness. I had never heard of Mornington Crescent until the Scottish rock band Belle and Sebastian released a song by that title, and then I visited the Tube stop in London a few years back, which is in the Camden Town area, a part of London Joey quite liked. Whether he liked the song I don't know; I doubt he'd heard of Humphrey Lyttleton.

Anyway, Humphrey Lyttleton died in April 2008, but just before he did he wrote a note to his loved ones, which read, in part, "As we journey through life, discarding baggage along the way, we should keep an iron grip, to the very end, on the capacity for silliness. It preserves the soul from desiccation." This is the sort of thing that only a mature person, someone who had seen plenty of silly's opposite in life and knew its true value, would say, but it's also the sort of thing that Joey, young as he was, understood perfectly. He was excellent at not taking himself too seriously, and he never, either as a teenager or afterward, put on the airs of a tortured intellectual the way that I did. In that way, he was much older than I was.

Now I find that without him, odd though it seems, I'm probably sillier than I ever was. Silliness helps to shout down the grief, which, for all of its exhausting persistence, is something that really can be shouted down. And it helps to keep me connected to my brother, because when I'm being silly I'm often acting the way we acted together. But it is also a fundamental way of relating to the world that fits more and more with what I've come to value, and, well, it's just more fun to be silly than not to be silly. The tinnitus of grief, or the sunglasses of grief, or whatever you want to call it, is not ever going to disappear. I understand that. But as I get older, and as I contemplate becoming a father (have I mentioned here that we're having a baby in April? I'll have more to say about this soon), I grow further and further away from the moody, serious person I was when I was younger, before I had to deal with any real tragedy. So make mine a Humphrey Lyttleton, and Edgar Allen Poe be damned.