The Art of Dying: Peter Schjeldahl 1942-2022

Art Critic Peter Schjeldahl has died, and in remembering him, many people referred to his 2019 essay, "The Art of Dying," written after he was diagnosed with terminal cancer. Of course, as it could only be, it is a meditation on life, on memories of the past, on appreciating the pressent, on some regrets ("I am beset, too, by obsessively remembered thudding guilts and scalding shames. Small potatoes, as traumas go, but intensified by my aversion to facing them"), on acceptance.

[When I got the news from the doctor] I was at the wheel of my first brand-new car since 1962, a blue Subaru Forester that I dote on. I wanted for nothing. I want for nothing. The other night, I dreamed that I fetched the car from a parking lot only to find that it was another Subaru Forester, with two hundred thousand miles on it, dirty and falling apart. (That’s diseased me now, I suppose.) But the real one sits gleaming on East Seventh Street.

Death is like painting rather than like sculpture, because it’s seen from only one side. Monochrome—like the mausoleum-gray former Berlin Wall, which kids in West Berlin glamorized with graffiti. What I’m trying to do here. Swatted a fly the other day and thought, Outlived you.