ABSTRACT
At the time he wrote the essays, originally published in the New England Journal of Meduine, which eventually became his book Lives of a Cell, Lewis Thomas was an acclaimed cancer researcher and president of Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York. Among his twenty-nine chapters, the one entitled “Death in the Open” seems to resonate most strongly with the younger undergrads I have in introductory courses. From reading many of their papers and excuses for missing exams, it seems that death, usually of a grandparent but often, sadly, of a former high-school classmate, figures prominently in their emotional lives. I get the distinct impression from their papers that something previously hidden suddenly has been revealed: an abstraction has now been given substance. For students at any biological field program, “Death in the Open” is particularly relevant, because Thomas begins his essay with a discussion of roadkill, one of our prime sources of teaching material: “Seen from a car window they appear as fragments, evoking memories of woodchucks, skunks…etc.” Thomas eventually addresses death as a natural phenomenon, and ends with a comment on humanity: “Less than half a century from now, our replacements will have more than doubled the numbers. It is hard to see how we can continue to keep the
secret, with such multitudes doing the dying.” The secret he is talking about is that of the death of our fellow human beings, a truly “vast mortality” of some 50 million a year. Czeslaw Milosz, a Polish Nobel Prize winner for literature, also deals with death in a way that is both historical and personal. Milosz (2001) comments that not only “has [death] made an especially spectacular appearance in my century,” in his case the twentieth, but also that “it is the real heroine of the literature and art which is contemporary with my lifetime.” He is certainly correct about the literature and art, and especially so if television and film can be considered literature and art, which I assert they can, although probably not in the way Milosz was thinking when he wrote those words. The United States is probably singular among modern superpowers in its propensity for public moralistic debate, although little of this discourse has truly noble underpinnings. No, the argument is over the never-ending parade of mayhem and murder that passes for entertainment.
