The Last Ditch by Tom Paine

Link: PJ O’Rourke: Death’s homework | Comment is free | The Guardian.

It had to happen. An interesting article at the Guardian’s "Comment is Free" site. However, PJ O’Rourke may have misjudged his audience. In reacting to being diagnosed with cancer, he writes

God created a free universe. He could have created any kind of universe He wanted. But a universe without freedom would have been static and meaningless – the taxpayer-funded-art-in-public-places universe.

Little does he know that "taxpayer-funded-art-in-public-places" is far more important to most Guardian readers than such a "bourgeois" concept as freedom.

O’Rourke is not your stereotypical American. Listening last weekend to an English acquaintance blathering on that Americans (yes, hundreds of millions of them – including most of the greatest living writers in the English language) don’t "get" irony, I was reminded how powerful that stereotype is. If there were one thing that I might buy as "typically American" however, it would be a strangely puritanical attitude to death. In accepting implicitly that God introduced pain and death into the universe to teach us that actions have consequences, O’Rourke seems also to accept the blame for his cancer. In this, he conforms to type. Had he lived differently, he seems to suggest, it would never have happened. He reminded me of an American friend who was furious with her mother’s doctors when the old lady died in her eighties. Americans sometimes seem to regard death as entirely avoidable.

Yes we can improve our odds by the lifestyle (and the doctors) we choose, but the fact is that we shouldn’t live well to avoid death. We should live well because we can’t avoid death. Every meal we eat, every glass of wine we drink, every mile we drive, every walk we take, every moment we spend with a loved one could be the last. We should live them accordingly. The happiest man I ever knew was left for dead on the battlefield at the age of 16. When the corpses were recovered for burial he was found to be alive. A bullet was dug out of him with a bayonet under a whisky anaesthetic. He saw every moment after that as a gift and never bemoaned his fate again (although many soft moderns would regard it as a hard one). He was lucky. That bullet taught him at an early age something that many of us only learn much later; often too late.

O’Rourke reckons that, given his lifestyle, his chance of survival (now said by his doctors to be 95%) has been improved by cancer. I hope he’s right and that his confrontation with the reaper further hones his wit. At his best, he’s one of the wittiest men alive. Even if you accept my view that you should read as if every book were your last, his works are worth a look. Unless, of course, you are a Guardian reader.