Neighboring Lives
I am saddened by news of the Independence Day suicide of Thomas M. Disch.

Of the many memories his death calls up, here is one: The last paper letter I wrote to Tom Disch, thirteen years ago, devoted a paragraph to the fact that on the very day that John Adams and Thomas Jefferson died, July 4, 1826, in far away Vienna Ludwig van Beethoven completed the C sharp minor String Quartet, Opus 131, one of the most sublime utterances in the history of the human race. I wrote that this too was a case of "Neighboring Lives", a phenomenon beautifully explored -- and beautifully named -- in the novel of that title that Disch and his longtime companion Charles Naylor published in 1980. It doesn't matter that there is no causal link between the deaths of Adams and Jefferson, or between the deaths of two of the greatest political innovators in history and the simultaneous completion by a third man of one of the greatest works of art. What is significant, in and of itself, is that they happened together, together in a larger sense, that these three events were part of the "mood" of creation at that instant in history, and that these happenings-together are in themselves significant, speak of and sign a greater state of interconnectedness, far-flung presences whispering together, ever so quietly, and gesturing with a single hand, a gesture which only we can see, and only now.

Neighboring Lives mirrored a trend in my own character, a way of seeing, and by so doing helped to bring it more sharply into focus. For that reason and many others it will remain among the most profound books ever to have graced my life.