THE DISTINGUISHED THING: Learning to Live Forever by Reading Miss MacIntosh, My Darling

Dear Lori, fellow bus companions, and subscribers:

It is a colossal understatement to say that death is a major topic in this book. The word appears in every chapter, but with unusual density in chapters 6, 47, and throughout the 50s, where the spotlight falls on Mr. Spitzer—his obsession with his dead twin, his fear of extinction, and his yearning for oblivion. The theme ranges from the intimate (Peron’s funeral preparations) to the cosmic: a galactic abyss “swallowing moons, suns, stars, city lights, cities” (566).

In the final chapter, 82—our present concern—this enlarged cosmic register returns, especially in the strange, sublime music Mr. Spitzer hears after the death of Catherine Cartwheel and the disappearance of the old Clam Digger: the music “of a dying universe” (1306).

Young wrote Miss MacIntosh, My Darling in the shadow of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. She was not blind to mass horror or historical catastrophe. And yet chapter 82 urges us to regard death from another angle, even with this backdrop of cosmic dissolution. Her model for this is the writer she most revered, the top-hat-and-cane Henry James, Young’s Mr. Spitzer avant la lettre. As Leon Edel tells it, James, after suffering the last of several strokes, murmured:

“So here it is at last—the distinguished thing.”

Death has worn many costumes across the millennia—grim reaper, ghastly harvester, hooded emissary. But with Henry James as our Virgil (and Emily Dickinson’s civil, spectral carriage-driver beside him), Death reveals a different face: not the executioner but the courtier, assisting in our great translation.

Chapter 82 ultimately asks us to wipe the tears from our eyes and engage in that supreme act of Remembrance—to recall both the dark and the light, inseparably mingled. The universe may be dying, but it dies singing. The music it creates is, to borrow Eliot’s phrase (“Dry Salvages”), a music heard “so deeply that it is not heard at all.”

To amplify this vision, we might gather a handful of voices from the aesthetic realm:

• Wallace Stevens, for whom “Death is the mother of beauty” (Sunday Morning);

• Shakespeare, advising in Sonnet 73 to “love that well which thou must leave ere long,” and giving Hamlet his “undiscovered country,” which Young gently rebukes with Prospero’s art;

• Walt Whitman, for whom the word death is “low and delicious” (“Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking”);

• Mary Oliver, stepping “through the door full of curiosity” in “When Death Comes”;

• Vladimir Nabokov, whose Speak, Memory imagines the infant’s cradle rocking over the abyss, with only a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness—prenatal and posthumous—recalling, uncannily, Mr. Spitzer’s life as “the spark of a match” (1321);

• And of course Virginia Woolf, who in To the Lighthouse answers the question “What is the meaning of life?” with those “daily little miracles… matches struck unexpectedly in the dark.”

We could go on indefinitely collecting testaments to this “distinguished thing,” but the point is simpler and more radical: MMMD is not merely a momentary stay against darkness; it expands the moment until it touches everything Mnemosyne stores in her abundant memory.

The act of writing we witness in Miss MacIntosh, My Darling—that delirious, oceanic overflow—refuses to treat death as an erasure. Instead it makes of the moment a chamber large enough to hold entire universes, both the dying and the yet-to-be-born. And by reading this book, we learn the trick: to glimpse the Everything that imagination makes briefly visible.

Dear subscribers and fellow bus companions:

In a sentence or two, what is your relationship with this distinguished gentleman, and how has reading Miss MacIntosh, My Darling altered your estimation of him/her/it? Share with Lori and me one of your own “daily miracles,” your own “match struck in the dark”—your imaginative claim to immortality.

Reply in the comment section below.

—Michael Sexson