Canetti treated survivors as those who lived in order that others would die, whose existence depended on annihilation, direct or otherwise. Guilt might continue to haunt the living, in the way that the sentimental always looks over its shoulder to see if an emotional response fits into the contours of the situational comedy in which so many have modeled so much of this bare life that squeezes into every corner of the canvas.

And that the book against death might succeed, in the same way a man may stand waiting for justice to arrive for an interminable term, isn’t the willing suspension of disbelief. The willing suspension is a sword dangling over our heads. The potential success of the book against death is the idea of time suspended, not so much paused as sidestepped.

Today I found myself again aboard the Titanic and aware of what the band really played as it went down.

How often do we find ourselves aboard the Titanic, begins a sermon in the Lutheran church from a pastor who last stayed in a hotel in the first Bush administration.

And let us not forgot the band who played music as the Titanic went down, begins the homily of a truly chaste, asexual priest who cannot help but wonder if his parishioners think of priests as a suspect class.

And in all variety of households, distributed evenly among the doomed and the elect and the as-yet-unaffiliated, countless 10 year olds are struggling to sleep, thinking about an indestructible ship which hit an iceberg and whose passengers had minutes to think about it before they perished.

Slowly he loses, one after another, the letters of the alphabet. Which remain? Which does he slur? Which is the last that he slurs?

Ode to the palsied, the bed-ridden, the soon to be aphasic, the bent and the broken, the heavily medicated and those who deserve and need hospice but have no one to foot that bill, to make passing on as comfortable as can be.