10-8-12:
Sunday night: attended a concert with O at St. Bart’s church: Mozart’s Requiem Mass, performed by an orchestra composed of Weill Cornell med students and doctors. One of the doctors recognized O and ushered us to some good seats. Exquisite performance. Saw Linn and Ved Mehta afterward. A rainy night.
Talking in the car on the way home: O said, listening to the Requiem he couldn’t help thinking about, in a way “picturing,” seeing, his own death and feeling “not troubled in the least—not serene, but … as if it is the right thing at the right time. And so it will be.”
I looked over at him and nodded. I took his hand.
Back home, we reheated the salmon and vegetables we’d made the night before, set the table, opened a bottle of wine, turned on the radio.
Cleaning up the kitchen, O, washing the dishes, commented: “One feels they want to be cleaned. One feels they appreciate it.” The dishwasher wasn’t completely full, so he added already-clean coffee mugs and glasses to it, “so they have company.”
He is endearing and hilarious this way, how he invests objects such as pots and pans and the table we eat on (rushing to put a protective place mat down so as not to “hurt” it) with feelings. He views most things—and I do mean things (pots, the alarm clock, his fountain pens, the piano, and most especially, books)—as having life to them, a nature … while at the same time acknowledging that this is absurd, ridiculous.
Earlier, over dinner, O talking about his late friend Gaj—Carleton Gajdusek, a Nobel laureate in medicine—with great excitement and conviction, comparing him to Goethe, of whom it was said, O told me, “He had a nature. A nature.”
I thought I knew what O meant—O, who has always disliked being pigeonholed, typed, as simply one thing or another, doctor or writer, gay or not, Jewish or atheist, etc.—but I wasn’t completely sure and prodded him.
“A nature,” he repeated, as if that was the only way to say it. “He wasn’t this or that, fitted with so many labels, an ‘identity,’ like people today, but all aspects of him were of a piece—this is who he was, not what he was; a force of nature, I suppose.”
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10-21-12:
Finding O at his desk, hunched over a yellow pad, writing, I sat across from him. He is working on a new “little piece”—an atheist’s take on the “absurd” idea of an afterlife. He’s titled it, “Seeing God in the Third Millennium.”
I like it already, I tell him. He reads for me the many pages he has written—twelve or fifteen. I am with him, every word. It reads fluidly, authoritatively.
Outside: a racket of horns blasting on Eighth Avenue; there must be a traffic jam. I can see the river of red lights. Oliver doesn’t notice anything. He has come to the end of what he has written. He is not sure where to go next. A phrase suddenly comes to him: “… a handsome apprehension of heaven …”
I say it sounds like Shakespeare.
“Close—sort of.” It’s Sir Thomas Browne, he tells me. “Help me find it, please,” he says, and I follow him into the small room in the back, where he has novels, plays, and poetry shelved—literature, not neurology or science books. He is at the B’s, studying titles, and immediately becomes agitated. “Now, where is it? Religio Medici, I know I have it.” He gets impatient when he’s excited; I half expect him to stomp his feet.
I am hugging him from behind and scanning the shelves: Borges, Burgess…
“I used to have all of Thomas Browne. All my books …” His voice trails off wistfully. “Oh, what has happened …?”
“Are you sure it’s in here?” I go into the living room and find the B’s. There: four or five volumes of Sir Thomas Browne.
“Excellent!” O exclaims. “Aren’t you clever! What would I do without you?”
“You’d go days without your keys or glasses—or your Thomas Browne.”
He settles back down at his desk. “Let’s have some wine,” he says.
I return with two glasses. He is paging through the fragile book, reading aloud his own annotations and underlined passages from fifty or sixty years ago. At last, he finds what he was looking for—“Not in Religio Medici, but in Christian Morals. I had forgotten. And on the very last page …”
He reads it to himself first, savoring the words, and then aloud to me: “‘Reckon not upon long life: think every day the last, and live always beyond thy account. He that so often surviveth his Expectation lives many Lives, and will scarce complain of the shortness of his days. Time past is gone like a Shadow; make time to come present—’”
“—So gorgeous,” I murmur.
O skips ahead a bit: “‘And if, as we have elsewhere declared, any have been so happy as personally to understand Christian Annihilation, Extasy, Exolution, Transformation, the Kiss of the Spouse, and Ingression into the Divine Shadow, according to Mystical Theology, they have already had—’”