Dying Read Online Free PDF Page A

stray iron filings. You have to
make the magnetic field so strong that it imposes its own order and holds the world
of the screenplay in its tense, suspenseful grip. In fiction you can sometimes be
looser and less tidy, but for much of the time you are choosing what to exclude from
your fictional world in order to make it hold the line against chaos. And that is
what I’m doing now, in this, my final book: I am making a shape for my death, so
that I, and others, can see it clearly. And I am making dying bearable for myself.
    I don’t know where I would be if I couldn’t do this strange work. It has saved my
life many times over the years, and it continues to do so now. For while my body
iscareering towards catastrophe, my mind is elsewhere, concentrated on this other,
vital task, which is to tell you something meaningful before I go. Because I’m never
happier than when I’m writing, or thinking about writing, or watching the world as
a writer, and it has been this way from the start.
    If I had a secondary ambition growing up it was to travel. And I’ve done a lot of
that, starting out with childhood expeditions led by my peripatetic father, then
going it alone, then teaming up with a husband who is afflicted with the same wanderlust
as I am. If anything, I’ve done too much moving around, to the point where I sometimes
envy people who have stayed in the same place all their lives and put down deep roots.
I blame my restlessness on Dad. He was an airline pilot who was happiest in mid-flight,
neither here nor there. As soon as he hit the ground he felt trapped. His flightiness
was the chief influence on my childhood. He moved constantly, from job to job, town
to town, country to country. To me this seemed like a natural way to live. I revelled
in the constant change, the excitement, the challenge of adapting to new situations.
It made me resilient and agile. If there was a cost to it all, I wasn’t too concerned,
at least not until my parents’ marriage fell apart under the strain.
    As soon as I was able to, I started travelling on myown. I didn’t have much of a
purpose in mind, merely to see what was out there. I can still remember the green
canvas bag I bought for my first solo trip. Compact and sturdy, it was a nod to my
father’s oft-repeated advice to travel light. I was headed for England, like so many
others of my generation, drawn to a country we thought we knew from reading about
it and seeing it on television. But travel, as well as being exhilarating, is also
a process of disillusionment, of measuring your expectations against a very different
reality. As I rode the train from Heathrow into London, I saw a landscape stripped
of all enchantment, barely breathing under a dull sky, and felt my spirits dip.
It was not exactly a disappointment, more a recognition that, in leaving home, I’d
merely exchanged one enigma for another.
    Of all my travels, the ones I’ve enjoyed the most have been to places I knew nothing
about. Especially my first trip to Japan back in 1982. I had no preconceptions about
the place apart from travel-poster visions of cherry blossoms and bullet trains.
I arrived in the dead of night, disembarking at Narita Airport, which at the time
was under siege from angry neighbourhood farmers opposed to its expansion. But I
didn’t know that, so I had no idea why the terminal was surrounded by razor wire
and guarded by riot police decked out in samurai-style armour. I stared out of the
bus window, transfixed, taking in thescene in all its fascinating detail, trying
to fathom what might be going on. Guesswork, all guesswork, and it remained that
way over the days and weeks to come, as I struggled with this most unfamiliar country,
this empire of signs, as Roland Barthes so aptly dubbed it. Was I reading the signs
right, or getting things hopelessly wrong? These were real-life questions when the
problem was reaching the right destination along a train line, or emerging from an
underground