Home > Work > The Violet Hour: Great Writers at the End
1 " Dylan Thomas was lying in a coma under an oxygen tent in St. Vincent’s Hospital. He had been lying there, unshaven, for three days. The precise cause of the coma was obscure, though he had been heard making the extravagant claim that he had eighteen whiskeys at the White Horse Tavern the night before he collapsed. "
― Katie Roiphe , The Violet Hour: Great Writers at the End
2 " The poet found illness a convenient language for his skewed relation to normal life, for his inability at times to function, for his radical abdication of responsibilities. Illness offered, for decades, a comfortable way for him to think about himself. Ever the poet, he pretty much set up camp and lived in the metaphor of being sick. "
3 " For us there is little to say. After all, we know that death belongs to life, that it is unavoidable and comes when it wants. "
4 " When Salter was fifty-five, his twenty-five-year-old daughter, Allan, died in an electrical accident. She was in the shower in a cabin next door to his in Aspen. He walked in and found her lying naked on the floor, the water running. He carried her dead body in his arms. He took her outside and tried to resuscitate her, somehow thinking she was drowning. We do not talk about this. He says only, “There was the wreckage of that. "
5 " What he means here is that he had thought his sons would die in the war and had readied himself for the loss. His faith in preparation is central: Freud’s barely submerged premise is that death is something to be mastered, something that one prepares for or practices. “If you would endure life,” he wrote in one of his essays, “be prepared for death. "
