I'm not sure if something's psychologically wrong with Mary Roach or not, but I'm sure glad she wrote this book...and you should be too - that way you don't have to go to medical schools and discuss cadavers with medical students...or head out to forensic science programs and look at bodies in various stages of decay (even to the point of liquefaction)...or watch an embalmer prepare a body for a funeral...or watch a organ donor transplant.

Yes, you should be glad that Mary did all of this for you. In fact, you should also be glad that folks have given their earthly vessels to science. It is their generous offer that, in its own fundamental way, allows our society to function better. Disease pathology helps find cures; crimes are solved; loved ones find resolution...and lives are given new leases.

Among her many topics about the afterlife of the human body, Roach discusses the history of finding viable human cadavers, which are not as plentiful as one would think. In fact, one of the reasons I was interested in reading this book was because of a dissertation my friend is working on, in which he tells the story of a slave named Grandison Harris - also known as the Resurrector at the Medical College of Georgia (yep, that'd be the same Medical College of Georgia that is around the corner from me!).  Resurrectors were men who dug up graves and removed the bodies and, for a fee (although in Mr. Harris' case, he was owned by the college and thus not paid for this grisly work), brought the bodies to medical schools for gross anatomy classes, or in some cases to given to those who studied anatomy as a (gruesome) hobby.   According to Roach, at some point the demand for cadavers got so great that if someone was ill, a person in the resurrecting business would deem it more profitable to murder an ill victim than to nurse him back to health:

When Burke and Hare found out how much money could be made selling corpses, they set out about creating some of their own.  Several weeks later a down-and-out alcoholic took ill with fever while staying at Hare's flophouse.  Figuring the man to be well on his way to cadaverdom anyway, the men decided to speed things along.  Hare pressed a pillow to the man's face while Burke laid his considerable body weight on top of him.  [An English anatomist Robert] Knox asked no questions and encouraged the men to come back soon. And they did, some fifteen times. 

Roach approaches her investigation into all the ways the dead can continue to help the living without the use of a seance. Her commentary is honest, gross, witty, and she is freaked out about and fascinated by what she witnesses. She is also grateful:

The incision is complete, and a nurse washes H off and covers her with a blanket for the trip to the morgue....We are instructed to wheel the gurney into the cooler, where it joins five others. H appears no different from the corpses already here.  But H is different. She has made three sick people well. She has brought them extra time on earth. To be able, as a dead person, to make a gift of this magnitude is phenomenal. Most people don't manage this sort of thing while they're alive. Cadavers like H are the dead's heros.

And the living, too.

As I closed the final book in my project, I couldn't help but to juxtapose it with the one by Long and Perry. It's interesting that while we can only speculate on what happens to our spirit in hora mortis, we can definitely know what happens to our bodies, and that the overriding idea is that no matter what the realm, we'll all probably have the same experience...in the end we are all dust and full of light.

P.S. - Don't read this book and then fall asleep. Just saying...

I had to stop by the library today to return some books that were on the verge of "overdue-yness." Seeing as I have a bit more than a week left in the project, I've stopped requesting items for my library book queue. So, there's nothing waiting for me, and I am falling back on browsing the shelves.  As you already know, there's generally nothing on the shelves at my library branch, so I went directly to the New Books area and decided to pick up this book.

I'm not huge on organized religion and I do believe in the idea of an Afterlife (Closer to the realm of "What Dreams May Come" than "City of Gold/Angels/Clouds/Neverending Church Service" - *yawn*) - so I've always been interested in books documenting Near Death Experiences (NDEs) - I read Raymond Moody's books in high school, and even before that I was intrigued by books discussing astral projection and other kinds of similar metaphysical phenomena.   Considering that I was familiar with most of the elements of the NDE (tunnel, life review, family and friends reunion, the choice to return to the body), I figured Dr. Long's book would be a quick read, and it was; but I did enjoy his coverage of the NDE on an international scale, which seems to be the main point of expansion between his and Moody's studies. 

In life, we create all these barriers - race, class, gender, politics, etc. - it's such a waste of time. In fact, it has always been why I don't subscribe to organized religions, which are predicated on both a belief in a deity, but then immediately negate that belief by assigning certain people to "heaven" or "hell" or "nowhere"...doing such a thing would cancel out the need for religion at all, since it's human nature to categorize and subjugate based on false constructs...but I digress...

Even within this speculation of what happens after we leave our physical bodies behind permanently (I mean, we won't truly know what happens "after" since everyone who is reporting on these experiences is ultimately NOT DEAD...), it is intriguing and interesting to think that in "short-term" death, we get the understanding that we are all the same.

Another totem of the NDE is that those who return experience great change in their lives. They have a clearer purpose, are more sympathetic to others, and feel freer since they are no longer afraid of dying.  I mean, this is the stuff of true humanity and of true relationship with the Universe, God, or whatever one wants to call it.

Whether or not you believe in the validity of the NDE, we can learn a lot from NDe-ers - mainly, that we should live fully, and not wait for a full death to prompt us to do so.

The title of this book is also a collection of plainchant melodies by the famous singing nun Hildegard Von Bingen.  I'm not knowledgeable about this genre of music, however I can surmise that the notes of Von Bingen's unadorned melodies find a mirror in Nunez's quasi-memoir of familial estrangement and displaced affection.

The unnamed protagonist is the third child (another daughter - *woe*) to a Chinese-Panamanian father (Carlos/Charlie Chang) and a German mother (Christa).  The parents met during Carlos' solider sojourn during World War II, and from all accounts, a coupling created by Christa's attempt to get the attention of her real love interest, results in a pregnancy, then later, another. Eventually Carlos and Christa get married and move to America - moving to a housing project that brings fits of self-loathing to Christa (having been duped into believing in the American Dream). After getting pregnant the third time (with our protagonist), the marriage completely breaks down - Charlie chooses to escape Christa's fits of anger by working all the time - taking on various food-service jobs at a local hospital and restuarants. Suffice it to say, Carlos works himself to death, leaving an angry, nervous, and cold Christa to take care of her daughters.

Meanwhile, our protagonist finds her own way to escape - immersing herself in ballet, she becomes increasingly enamored of the art, including the rituals of preparing for dance class, and even enjoying the smells of a different kind of hard, cold, technical, and exacting labor:

...I am led by that most powerful organ of memory; the nose. Sweat, rosin, and Jean Nate, the freshener may dancers used to splash on after class. The sweat-soaked wooden floors had their own pungent odor.  The beloved reek of the studio. For me, a holy smell, signifying work, sacrifice and ardor...It was in the studio that I learned for the first time that some people work out of love.

I found this interesting and thought that really, she was seeking her mother - only in ballet, she was at least seeing the results and "getting something back." As she moves onto her adult life, she eventually becomes involved with a Russian immigrant - a toughened married man with children who has a past that places him as a bully at best and criminal at worst. They both know he won't leave his wife, and our protagonist is always at his physical beck and call - until an ironic confession abruptly cuts him out of her life.

I never fully comprehended who our protagonist is or why she makes the decisions she makes, and I get the feeling that the author doesn't know why, either. The unnamed woman doesn't seem to do much self-reflection. While the story starts out as a tale of growing up as the child of disconnected immigrant parents, I don't really get the feeling that she was particularly "affected" by her father's absence or her mother's temper. Instead, she takes their personalities on somewhat face value - easily attributing her parents personalities as self-contained and only consequential to them.  Even the brief discussions with her girlfriends don't offer a full view of who this character is. She is literally a feather and a featherweight - someone who flits in front of you as a interesting surprise, and flits right back out as a curious moment in time. And rightly, you'll almost forget she was ever there.

This book almost didn't get read (by me). When I first saw it at my local library, I picked it up, read the first lines, and put it back.  A few days later I found myself back at the library, looking at this book again. I decided to take it with me. I didn't know who Natsume Soseki was, and quite frankly, the thing that attracted me to the book was the way this particular edition (Penguin) had formatted the book - 110 chapters, all about two pages each. I thought "this will be a fast read!" (like, one day). Not so much.

But first, you should know a bit about Soseki (born Natsume Kinnosuke), a Japanese writer revered in his country for his literary prowess.  Born in the late 1800s, he wrote several novels (including a curiously titled book: I Am A Cat), poetry, and was a scholar focusing on British literature.  In short, Soseki is seen as one of the eternal Laureates of his country. For a time his likeness was placed on Japanese currency (Wouldn't be nice to see Hawthorne, Morrison et al. on the American C-note?). Anyway, apparently, Kokoro is one of those books that remains on modern day Japanese school reading lists. 

The interesting thing about Kokoro is that it is told by a man who is unnamed, and the storyteller in turn doesn't tell us the real name of the main character in his story - immediately telling the reader in the first line that he will only offer one name to his friend: Sensei.

I always called him Sensei, and so I shall do in these pages, rather than reveal his name.  It is not that I wish to shield him from public scrutiny - simply that it feels more natural.

In the first 54 chapters, our storyteller - a man recalling his time as a young student - tells us how he met Sensei on a beach - becoming almost immediately infatuated with him, and subsequently becoming a tacitly welcomed member of Sensei's life. Sensei has secrets, and quite frankly, as I read more, I just pinned a personality of "Accidental Misanthrope" on him. Sensei often tells his young friend about the fleeting, contemptuous nature of their kind of friendship - he being the "teacher" and the younger being the student - even if it is informal. Also, he seems to hold a barely contained contempt for his young friend's inexperience in matters of love. As our protagonist gets more intwined with Sensei's life, he becomes more and more intrigued and frustrated with Sensei's contadictory attempts to keep him at arms length (emotionally) and draw him into his inner life (physically).  Eventually, the young student is called away to the country to check on his ailing father, and during that time (which he desperately pines for a word from Sensei), he finally get a chilling letter from Sensei.

The second part of this book is Sensei's letter: a moving memoir of his days as a student and a bachelor, and the tragedy surrounding how he became a husband unworthy of friendship or love. Sensei succinctly tells his protege about the weaknesses engrained in strong family ties, the perils of sympathetic friendships, and the price one pays for using false contempt for love as a weapon.

Kokoro, tersely translated from Japanese, means "heart," and I can tell you that exploring the heart is not a quick feat. It is a subtle, probing, careful and reflective endeavor. Such an exercise is quiet, raw, tedious and flexible. And it can be devastating. When such a daunting task is written about so cleanly, without embellishment but with the slightest hint of sympathy and not a hint of condescension, it is a masterpiece.

In this manner, I welcomed the four days it took me to complete this stunning work.