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Midas
Dekkers is the Stephen Jay Gould of Holland, a popular biologist
and writer who illuminates the messy processes of life with the
sheer force of his lively, eminently readable prose. His latest
book, THE WAY OF ALL FLESH, puts forth the inevitable fact that
where there is life there is death. With evident glee, Dekkers piles
on the evidence: the holes in our Swiss cheese are created by bacteria
farting gasses into moldering cheese; the skin and hair on which
we lavish so much care is already dead; and even the most well-intentioned
attempts at historical preservation are misguided and often hasten
the processes of decay.
There's at least a touch of smugness in Dekkers's rehearsing of
the myriad ways in which our food, our bodies, our loved ones, and
our world are destined to crumble and return to dust. But it's to
a purpose: Western society, according to Dekkers, is obsessed with
youth --- with plastic surgery and Viagra, with beauty, novelty,
and the notion of continual rebirth. In humbler times, people saw
fit to keep memento mori close at hand: Dekkers mentions
the 18th century "stairway of life" drawings; one might
also mention Shakespeare's obsession with time's fleeting arrows,
or Beckett's pithy formulation that man "gives birth astride
a grave." But we moderns prefer to look forward rather than
backward, up instead of down. Perhaps Dekkers's most hard-hitting
observation is that the so-called "gray explosion," the
burgeoning populations of the elderly in Western societies, has
been foreseeable for at least the past 50 years; but we have been
collectively looking the other way and are left totally unprepared.
Ignoring aging and death is not only unrealistic, it neglects what
Dekkers sees as the romance of ruins and the semi-tragic beauty
of decay. Dekkers makes a case for allowing buildings to fall to
pieces naturally, rather than be knocked down, and for art and historical
artifacts to be left alone. Pointing out that "where there's
death, there's life," he cites the bizarre story of how, when
the British Museum was bombed in 1940, silk tree seeds brought from
China 150 years earlier spontaneously began to sprout, sparked to
life by the hoses of the fire brigade.
It seems appropriate that this book was written by a Dutchman; even
during their Golden Age, the Dutch weren't able to feel immortal,
knowing that their low lands could at any time be reclaimed by the
sea. Dekkers possesses the wry wit and lack of pretensions of the
best European intellectuals, and the English translation by Sherry
Marx-MacDonald is nearly flawless. While it's not exactly an uplifting
book, THE WAY OF ALL FLESH is strangely satisfying, offering a palliative
to our culture's obsession with the next big thing by reminding
us of the fragility of all things.
--- Reviewed by Martha Hostetter
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