It’s strange that of all the deaths in literature, the one I felt the most (and still feel) takes place in passing: “[Mr. Ramsay, stumbling along a passage one dark morning, stretched his arms out, but Mrs. Ramsay having died rather suddenly the night before, his arms, though stretched out, remained empty.]” It’s not just that Mrs. Ramsay goes parenthetically that gets me, but the way that the moment of her going cannot be located even within this aside, the construction “having died” leaving a penumbra of presence around which the language tries and fails to throw its arms.
If we’re thinking about how language captures the force of living, then the absence of that force – and especially the moment of space at which it breaks off, the edge of the line between shadow and day, seems to me to be a necessary site to examine. Hooke writes of the point of a needle that it is “made so sharp, that the naked eye cannot distinguish any parts of it … But if view’d with a very good Microscope, we may find that the top of a Needle (though as to the sense very sharp) appears a broad, blunt, and very irregular end; not resembling a Cone, as is imagin’d, but onely a piece of a tapering body, wit a great part of the top remov’d, or deficient” (43).
Such a description reminds me of Mrs. Ramsay’s death in To The Lighthouse, and of the death of Hejinian’s father in My Life — although they are sharply felt, even under magnification the piercing point cannot precisely be seen as a point. “I wanted to carry my father up all those stairs. But the argument decays, the plot goes bit by bit. A doddering old man on the street stops to smile at toddlers” (71), Hejinian writes, telling the reader her father is dying; “There was no proper Christmas after he died” (75), he remarks later, telling her reader that the moment has passed. But what lands in-between, to mark the passage? First, a passage (temporal): “Good lot of groceries, and the baby on one hip reaching over, 50 years in between, but that might have been a replacement, at least a comfort” (72). Then, a passage (spatial): “All reflections have depth, are deep. It seemed we had hardly begin and we were already there.” Then, a nesting-doll of suspensions: “‘How am I to choose between all the objects I have remembered because they once seemed beautiful to me, now that I feel much the same about them all,’ he answered” (73). The moment we are looking for doesn’t have any substance at all; death, it seems, does not take place, but rather leaves it.
So Hooke gives us a list of things sharper than the point of a needle, all of which are alive: “…though this point be commonly accounted the sharpest (whence when we would express the sharpness of a point the most superlatively, we say, As sharp as a Needle) yet the Microscope can afford us hundreds of Instances of Points many thousand times sharper: such as those of the hairs, and bristles, and claws of multitudes of Insects; the thorns, the crooks, or hairs of leaves, and other small vegetables; nay, the ends of the stiriae or small parapellipipeds of Amianthus, and alumen plumosum…” (42). He counterposes these to writing — specifically, to the “full stop, or period” (43) – and notes: “…among multitudes I found few of them more round or regular … but very many abundantly more disfigur’d” (44). Turning to other writing in minuscule, he observes that “…what the Writer of it had asserted of it was true, but with all [I] discover’d of what bungling scribbles and scrawls it was compos’d … it was for the most part legible enough, though in some places there wanted a good well fantsy well preposest to help one through” (44). Perhaps, then, science and text here conspire to show us the impossibility of marking the dimensionless point, the boundaries between living and dying and dead; can only give to us passing in passing. – Ilan