I read this book in 2024 shortly after Schjedahl, the art critic for The New Yorker for more than 30 years died of lung cancer.  A life-long smoker, Schjedahl was also a former alcoholic who was sober for decdes and a man who could really write.

In reading my review of this book which you can find at https://epsteinreads.com/the-art-of-dying-writings-2019-2022-by-peter-schjeldahl-3284/, I noticed that I focused on his reviews of gallery and museum shows rather than on the eponymous essay which he wrote about his illness and his looming death.  Having decided to read about death this month, however, I instead focused on the initial essay, “The Art of Dying”.

In the same way that he brought a finely honed personal perspective and great writerly skill to his art reviews, Schjedahl approached his death in his own, unique way.  Not a religious person, he didn’t take the Blaise Pascal approach of converting on his deathbed, but he also didn’t deny the comfort and value that religion could provide.  The essay summarizes his roller coaster life—quiet childhood in the Midwest, a college dropout, a beat poet in Greenwich Village, a committed smoker, a reformed alcoholic and drug user, a divorced father of a daughter, an award winning New Yorker art critic, and a dying man given a reprieve by a new immunotherapy drug regimen—but for me, the final sentence was the major take home message.  In that brief sentence, he summarized his views on death and advised the reader in a very Montaigne-like message: ” Take death for a walk in your minds, folks. Either you’ll be glad you did or, keeling over suddenly, you won’t be out anything.”  Impermanance, inevitability, universality—they’re all there as they were for so many of the writers this month.  Don’t struggle; don’t crave more; don’t try to hold on, but dwell with death and make it your friend.  Well said, Peter.  I miss you.