Recently, I have been thinking about a television play “Cold Lazarus” with Albert Finney I saw years ago when we lived in London. It was written by the great British television playwright Dennis Potter (“Pennies from Heaven,” “The Singing Detective”), and it was one of the last plays he wrote before he died.
The dominant image of the play was a severed living human head that was kept alive and talking by technological intervention in a dystopian Britain. For some reason, as years have passed, the image has stuck with me—and as I have gotten older, I have finally understood why.
When I stumble walking to my local café, I feel my fragility and know that I have difficulty controlling my body and balance—though my mind, like the one in the play, is luckily still lucid and functioning, despite a penchant for forgetting film titles and names of people I know casually.
I also take showers and get the mail in the lobby wary of every misstep, but I still can sporadically read The New York Review of Books, watch a difficult foreign film, and write reviews and essays. My head remains alert and aware of everything around me, but at the same time, my body slowly crumbles. The long walks I took in the city exploring different neighborhoods are long past. In the past, I loved discovering the essence of neighborhoods and the rhythm of their street life—finding shops and observing people who gave the area character.
However, I still try to notice the ever-changing city from cab windows or hobble a block or two and directly experience the sensations of the street.
On one extremely frigid day, my wife and I go to Strand Bookstore—one of the few remaining New York City bookstores that sells second-hand books (though in recent years, the second-hand book offerings are balanced by expensive new books and holiday gifts). It is a different, much less musty and pure bookstore than it was many years ago, but it is still one of the best bookstores in the country. When I get inside the store, I sit down on my walker and check over the large fiction section, which always carries books from The The New York Review of Books Press, including Croatian, Finnish, and Danish novels that are hard to find—books that are neither best sellers nor written by well-known writers, but if I had 10 more years left, I would at least make a try at reading some of them.
We leave Strand, and I stumble with my wife a block to the NewsBar—a crowded, popular café that serves salads, soup, and sandwiches. It is too packed and noisy, but we take pleasure in just being out of the house after days barely braving the cold.
On the next day, I am off to my café, Think, my head filled with thoughts about Trump’s imperial invasion of Venezuela. Maduro was corrupt, authoritarian, stole an election, and headed a shattered economy, but Trump’s illegal invasion was carried out with little interest in establishing democracy and much more in controlling oil wealth, exciting his political base, and making Americans not think about his domestic economic failures and the odious Epstein saga. Additionally, we may not have fully neutralized Maduro’s troops and supporters, so more violence and chaos may occur on the streets of Caracas. I know much more will be known in the weeks to come.
My head, like the one in “Cold Lazarus” remains alive, as my physical capacities slowly diminish.
