LONG DISTANCE: A Year of Living Strenusously. - Review - book review

Washington Monthly, Dec, 2000 by Scott Thompson

LONG DISTANCE: A Year of Living Strenusously by Bill McKibben Simon & Schuster, $23.00

ONLY IN THE PAST GENERATION have we in the secular West really begun to demystify and learn to live with death. In Buddhism, death is regarded as the greatest transition and one's entire life is a preparation for it; life is a learning experience in its direction, and all small parts of it are just metaphors for the larger reality that comes upon all of us.

Bill McKibben, who has written well on global warming and nature in general, has written a short book ostensibly on his preparation for a skiing competition. The first half leaves one with a sense of self-indulgence and me-generation self-improvement--though I do wish when I was training as a runner I'd known a tenth as much about body fluids, lactic acids, water levels, and glutes as he shows in his almost endless preoccupation with his planned cross-country skiing marathon. One barely knows that he has a wife and daughter--somewhere.

We are over three-fifths of the way through when the point of the book emerges. McKibben's father develops malignant brain cancer; plainly, he is going to die. Somewhere Freud reminds us that the most important event in the life of a man is the death of his father, to which many of us could add our validating testimony. The remainder of this essay-turned-elegy is McKibben's father's "spiraling deterioration," pulling the author away from his own continuing quest for early-midlife conquest of himself. "The irony of strapping on my heart rate monitor ... while Dad's heart was laboring simply to keep going was not lost on me," writes McKibben, though it takes quite a while for him to realize that his father's "last gift" is "snap[ping] me out of my self-absorption."

Clearly his father, also a writer, is a hero, not just to his son, and we don't need convincing that the 68-year-old man will die with dignity "--not pride, but its opposite, the dignity of someone untroubled by pride." More importantly, we watch the father coming to terms with his own life and death. McKibben's father's dreams were of climbing up to a cliff, where the view is higher; and he had "far to fall" because a body is "so stuffed full of life that each layer stripped away reveals another, more primordial, beneath."

McKibben comes to see that dignity doesn't lie in the body; it comes from "somewhere else," though he isn't sure quite where. True, the body is "the physical form that made his [father's] goodness real. That gave it a shape--lanky, bald--that lasted into memory." We don't get an idea of where dignity of self is located, but at least we know he found where it isn't. As he said in a noble eulogy, "what a gift it was ... that you could be a man his way, full of love and kindness and good humor and hard work. But not full of yourself."

We usually learn too late what our fathers mean to us. Mozart couldn't write Don Giovanni until his always threatening parent was gone. In our smaller arenas most of us are the same, like this writer who couldn't even make himself believe that he could run a good race until his accomplished athlete-father had died--and then unwittingly, unaware for a decade of its import, set out running marathons while the memory of his father's death was still close by.

I finished this well-crafted book grateful to have learned so much about the realities of training for world-class competitions, fascinated that someone could let us into his self-focussed life so effortlessly and smoothly, and ultimately relieved that he had begun to envisage something beyond his own quest for physical perfection. He hasn't burdened us with an apparat of death research, paradigms, phases, and claptrap.

One has the feeling, however, that McKibben has only produced the first half of an opus in this meditation on his father's death. Indeed, one finishes the book feeling he just can't leave us hanging like this without some further exploration of"what it's all about."

My own sense is that McKibben has come closer to a Buddhist commentary than he may be conscious of, and in fact he never uses that term. But his own extended metaphor, in showing the comparison that starts as a resolution of the dissonance between his father's decline and his own assault at perfection, is too powerful to cast aside as abruptly as he does. His maniacal training regime is, in a way, a preparation for death. But even if one ends the book wanting more, one has to credit McKibben for at least opening his inexhaustible subject.

SCOTT THOMPSON is co-author of The Baobob and the Mango Tree: African and Asian Contrasts.