Running with the Pack Read Online Free PDF Page A

as one thing and death as another, I tend to think more in terms of a gradual process of disappearing. Life, fundamentally, is a process of erasure. After a promising, but as it turns out essentially disingenuous, first couple of decades or so, I slowly become less and less of what I was. Death is an admittedly significant point in this process — a late and irreversible stage of my disappearance. But erasure doesn’t stop there. Not content with my destruction, the process rumbles on until every trace I might have left, any indication that I was once here, is also obliterated. So, instead of thinking in crude dichotomous terms — life—death — I apparently like to think in crude trichotomous terms instead: decline + death + deletion = disappearance.
    Conversely, it would be an error to think of death as an event safely cordoned off in the future. Death is impatient and insists on putting in little appearances before the curtain goes down; little cameos that gradually increase in their frequency and transparency. As the outstanding, and perhaps for that reason largely forgotten, Hungarian phenomenologist Aurel Kolnai pointed out: the basis of all disgust is death in life. Our decline is really death creeping up on us in various ways, sneaking us various little previews of what lies in store. My apparently gouty toe is a swollen, putrid corpse appendage. The hard body of my twenties slowly becomessoft and slack, like an orange that has sat in the bowl a few days longer than it should. The hairs that sprout from various parts of me, parts from which, I would have thought, they have no business sprouting, these are opportunistic colonies of mould that have made this overripe orange their home. In these ways and others, my death likes to exhibit itself long before the end of the show.
    Perhaps these little cameos should produce in me nothing more than a wry smile. Death does have a sense of humour, I might tell myself. Julian Barnes tells a story of a former soldier, worn down by life, who asked Julius Caesar, his former general, for permission to end his life. Caesar replied: what makes you think that what you have now is life? Caesar also had a sense of humour, just not a good one. No doubt he was being a little harsh, a little premature. But we are all now aware of the idea of a person disappearing before the end of their biological life. This is a recurring horror of mine. I’ve seen the closing years of enough lives to understand the levels of fear and confusion embodied in them. To approach death is gradually, progressively, to become un-homed. ‘I just want to go home now,’ my dying grandmother once said to me from her nursing home. And so I imagine myself in years to come telling some person I do not know that I just want to go home now. But in this future there is no home. Soon, I’ll not even remember what a home is.
    So I am running this marathon, perhaps, because some horror stories are true. There is a part of me that likes this explanation. There is a comforting familiarity — even nostalgia — that accompanies it. Circumstances have seen me live much of my adult life outside Britain, but I’m still enough of a Brit to recognize the age-old tradition of taking an activity thatsomeone does and finding ways to denigrate it — ideally by casting aspersions on the motives or character of the person doing it. I appreciate this tradition for the cultural art form that it is — even when I am the person whose motives or character are thus aspersed. Now I know why I’m running this marathon. It’s a midlife crisis, mate .
    And yet I am far from alone in my new avocation. I’m part of a rapidly growing cultural phenomenon — the forty-something who has become obsessed with testing the limits of his or her endurance. In this respect, my efforts are embarrassingly feeble. Forget marathons: ultra running events — foot races of fifty miles, a hundred