I am writing a new series of posts presenting brief profiles of exemplary lives. I plan to write about Christopher Hitchens, Susan Sontag, and Fr Pedro Arrupe, SJ, but I may write more, so let me know what you think.Â
What do Hitchens, Sontag, and Arrupe have in common? In their day, they were leading public intellectuals. Each wrote about their experience of illness, and they or others have written about how they approached their deaths. Hitchens and Sontag were great essayists who died of cancer. Arrupe was the Superior General of the Society of Jesus from 1965 to 1983, the period when the order committed itself to social justice. He died of the consequences of a stroke. Arrupe wrote less than Hitchens or Sontag. But he lived an extraordinary life—Arrupe was in Hiroshima on August 6, 1945!—and wrote passionately about that life.
What is my motivation for this? Virginia Woolf argued thatÂ
The biographer must go ahead of the rest of us, like the miner’s canary, testing the atmosphere, detecting falsity, unreality, and the presence of obsolete conventions. His sense of truth must be alive and on tiptoe... He must revise our standards of merit and set up new heroes for our admiration. (‘The Art of Biography’ 1939)
I want to understand how writers with complex lives and intense moral commitments dealt with illness and death.
If your life matters, surely the manner of your death does too. Observing the previous generation of my family, I was struck by how some handled the ends of their lives with courage and dignity while others experienced terror and despair. I want to learn how this is done. Engaging with these writers will allow me to reflect on my life and writing.
Please, continue. I'd suggest Shunryū Suzuki, as a candidate for your future writing.