ONE OF my hobbies is the collecting of deathbed utterances. I consider this pastime thoroughly healthy-minded. Philately seems far less defensible. A stamp is issued by a faceless government office with which our personal connection is slight. A good passing remark, as we may call it, is issued by an interesting human being taking a final journey we are all scheduled to make. True, a stamp's value may increase, but a great curtain line's value is vast to begin with. Into it a man may pack the meat, the very pemmican of his character. He may say what he truly thinks or--just as revealing--what he would like us to think he thinks. In short, I collect death- bed statements for the life that is in them.
To all is granted the experience of dying, to none the experience of death. We may watch the candle as it gutters but never as it goes out. My file of final bulletins therefore tells us nothing about the exact moment of extinction but much, I think, about the highly charged period just before that moment.
Some of the bulletins, of course, are too deliciously pat to be trustworthy--Voltaire's for example. As his bedside lamp flared up he is supposed to have said, "The flames already?" Of all these communications, however, I find least satisfactory those that have been patently worked up against that
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