The lovely Japanese film After Life is a fable about where people go right after they die; it turns out to be a run-down hotel in the country. People arrive one by one, a little disoriented. Each person is given a room and told they can stay until they pick a single memory in which to live forever. Once they pick the memory, the staff re-creates it and the person settles in and disappears. Some people choose immediately and happily fade away. Another person spends days reviewing the jerky black-and-white films of his life, trying to pick one. A few people have no happy memories and just sit on their beds, lost. A few others find it impossible to decide: their lives are full. (One of the key parts of the plot is what happens to the ones who can't decide.)i turned to joe in bed. "hey, can i tell you something?" he was almost asleep. "no, no! well...okay." "my book is talking about a movie where dead people have to choose the one memory they'll live in forever, and mine would be when we were standing in the rain in the garden in oxford." "oh. that's really nice. i thought you were going to tell me about a dead duck."
When I showed After Life to a group of people, we did what every viewer will do, and thought about which memory we would choose. I was struck by the common thread, for me and for many people: it was the moment after. Not the adventure, the experience, the unfulfilled desire, but afterward. The moment at the end of a good day when you are going home and are a little sore and sweaty, you are getting hungry, your feet are dirty, and you are going home to rest.
02.22.19
i've been reading advice for future corpses (and those who love them), a book on death and dying by a writer who's (among other things) a buddhist and a palliative-care nurse.
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2 comments:
Marriage:).
Also it's funny, I thought of a time when me and F and K and P were at this beautiful isolated empty beach on Kona, perfect weather, ultimate, but we didn't have any food with us and we only had enough water not to be terribly thirsty so I had to move my memory tomb to my second choice. Same people, same island, but the pool with a swim-up bar. Ha!
years before - the night we first talked! it was raining so hard after a while that i had to ptooi my words. worth it.
joe's duck comment wound me back around to lydia davis's "happiest moment," which i've always loved:
If you ask her what is a favorite story she has written, she will hesitate for a long time and then say it may be this story that she read in a book once: an English-language teacher in China asked his Chinese student to say what was the happiest moment in his life. The student hesitated for a long time. At last he smiled with embarrassment and said that his wife had once gone to Beijing and eaten duck there, and she often told him about it, and he would have to say the happiest moment of his life was her trip, and the eating of the duck.
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