Why obits are today’s only ‘good news’
By some accounts, two people die every second. But at this moment in American life, the death of our best people – Toni Morrison, Aretha Franklin, Philip Roth – has become a collective lifeline and refuge for our anxieties. It sometimes seems that the obituary is the only news that makes us feel whole.
Morrison was our essential conscience, a writer of narrative brilliance and moral clarity. The magnitude of her loss, at this moment in our descent into barbarism, is incalculable. But to spend time with her work is infinitely more rewarding than reading about all the other terrible things that have happened in the past few days.
We also crave the reassurance that we are not, as a species, entirely spent. Morrison died only days after two mass shootings, which are not only a regular fixture of American life, but also a recurring reminder of our political paralysis and the corruption of our democracy. We are in the midst of a trade war, markets have plunged, and our president tweets racism to inflame a hungry audience of white nationalists who dream of a world without people like Morrison in it.
Artists, performers, scientists, writers and other creators rarely ‘‘make news’’ in the way politicians do, even though their influence on our culture is greater, deeper and more meaningful. The obituary is a belated observation and acknowledgment that people like Morrison made news every day through their work. They are the atmosphere of American culture, while all else is merely weather.
Obituaries are a paradox of sorts, a diversion to what really matters. The response to the rest of the news is often an impulse to escapism, a turning away. Obituaries like those for Morrison are even better than the usual ‘‘good’’ news, which is often little more than a reminder that somewhere, somehow, someone has done an unnecessary kindness; obituaries are redemptive on a grander scale.
The death of an artist is different from the loss of political leaders, no matter how wise or benevolent, or the larger passing of a generation, which has continued since the beginning of time. Morrison’s work remains with us, intractable, urgent and uncompromising.
It is curious to listen to people on television debating the effectiveness of this policy or that plan, often arguing themselves into the absurdity that, because nothing has yet worked, therefore nothing new should be attempted. Meanwhile, the work of artists outlives them, operating on minds too young to be cynical. Politicians die and, if they’re lucky, are memorialised for having fixed something in the broken world they inherited. Artists die, and we flock to what they left behind.
If you want to change the world, authentically and for the better, would you live your life like a politician, or a businessman, or a pharmaceutical executive or Donald Trump? Or would you live it like Toni Morrison? –