Dr. Lewis Thomas achieved some fame as an essayist for The New England Journal of Medicine, perhaps most famously with the collection “Lives of a Cell.” But for whatever reason it was “Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler’s Ninth Symphony” that has survived on my shelves since I purchased it in paperback some 28 years ago. I remember being affected by his death in 1993, perhaps because mortality and doom was so often his topic, and I was a young man in my 20s and therefore overly obsessed with both topics. My mother had died in middle age right after I graduated from college, and I imagined my own death could not be far off. This book opens with a meditation on Hiroshima and ends with the title essay, about the threat of nuclear destruction from an exchange of missiles between America and the Soviet Union. This was a real prospect that we lived with every day, and it was a given belief among people in my generation that we would probably all die in a horrific world explosion some day. His late night thoughts on the missiles are bracing, and thankfully he has been proven wrong so far by the unexpected turns in history that would come in the years after he wrote these words in the early 1980s:
“I am old enough by this time to be used to the notion of dying, saddened by the glimpse when it has occurred but only transiently knocked down, able to regain my feet quickly at the thought of continuity, any day. I have acquired and held in affection until very recently another sideline of an idea which serves me well at dark times: the life of the earth is the same as the life of an organism: the mind contains an infinite number of thoughts and memories: when I reach my time I may find myself still hanging around in some ort of midair, one of those small thoughts, drawn back into the memory of the earth: in that peculiar sense I will be alive. Now all that has changed. I cannot think that way anymore. Not while those things are still in place, aimed everywhere, ready for launching.”