Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Seize the Day

2023; University of Missouri; Volume: 46; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/mis.2023.0009

1548-9930

Speer Morgan,

Grief, Bereavement, and Mental Health

Seize the Day Speer Morgan We often do well at forgetting about mortality. It's not useful to relentlessly mull over the subject, since it might be hard to get our teeth brushed and the day going. Commercial culture, however, does make us try to avoid the subject. After all, if only I bought a Mustang Mach-E, I would float down Highway 1 with a smile on my face and a beatific, intimate friend by my side and probably live forever—with, of course, no mudslides cluttering my sublime and forever right-of-way. The immortal delusion is not a new subject; most religions and bodies of wisdom have been reminding us of it for the last four or five millennia—rigorously, since it doesn't seem to stick. Horace's first-century bce ode offering the injunction carpe diem quam minimum credula postero is the classic example. It shows that even when mortality is in the very meaning of the poem, we still tend to remember the "seize the day" part and forget the end of the sentence, "trusting as little as possible in the next one." The Metaphysical poets of the seventeenth century played directly with the subject of mortality, along with romantic love—as a strong encouragement to love, in fact. In "To His Coy Mistress," Andrew Marvell professes to his reticent beloved that while he should spend a hundred years praising her eyes, two hundred each breast, and "thirty thousand all the rest," alas, "The grave's a fine and private place/But none, I think, do there embrace," so "Now let us sport us while we may,/And now, like amorous birds of prey,/Rather at once our time devour/Than languish in his slow-chapped power." In Seize the Day, Saul Bellow's fourth novel, the character Tommy Wilhelm is in most ways a loser. A forty-year-old ex–furniture salesman, [End Page 6] recently divorced, fumbling through the day making one mistake after another, he loses the last of his savings to a con artist he thinks is a trustworthy friend and pleads with his unsympathetic rich father for money. In the end, he begins to find his way out of self-absorption by confronting a human corpse and waking to the humility of mortal awareness. This awareness, from various perspectives, is among the most often repeated subjects of modern fiction. Anton Chekhov, Leo Tolstoy, Franz Kafka, James Joyce, Flannery O'Connor, Toni Morrison—the examples don't stop. D. H. Lawrence was right beside Horace with his emphasis on sexual love and death in both his stories and novels. The 1989 movie Dead Poets Society is about a boarding-school teacher who encourages his students to fully grasp transience and make their lives extraordinary, which proves tragic for one of them yet continues to prove inspiring for the rest. This issue's fiction includes four stories about living vitally in the present. Not coincidentally, all but one of them also address death. In our Editors' Prize–winning story, "Trouble Will Find You" by Ann-Marie Blanchard, Australian phenom Violet Hardy is an Olympicbound skateboarding champion when injuries from a fall, along with a desire to escape her life in the public eye and media, cause her to drop out and disappear. But marriage, menial work, and a move to Ireland and then to Alaska can't take her far enough from the sport she lives for, and she finds herself skating again, this time undercover. It's a story about talent, passion, and betrayal. Jennafer D'Alvia's beguiling fiction "Mother Stay" begins with a cloud of recently dead mothers falling out of the sky. The only hitch is that they return at random ages, and the story's narrator finds herself in the position of parenting a teenage mother who is less interested in her daughter than in her new teenage social scene. Abby Geni's "The Rapture of the Deep" also deals with the death of a mother. Eloise, a marine biologist who studies and swims with sharks, gets her daredevil streak from her mother, an adventurer who reveled in extreme sports and died in a skydiving accident...