Critchley - Very little-- almost nothing : death, philosophy, literature

If one spends much of ones time writing, oras is sadly more often the casethinking about writing, then it is often difficult to know whether work follows life or whether it is the other way round. In memory, life and work tend to merge deceptively. That said, Very Little Almost Nothing belongs to a troubled period in my life. I wont go into too much detail, but events circled around my fathers illness with lung cancer which resulted in his death a couple of days after Christmas 1994. I remember taking breaks from nursing him by sitting downstairs and reading Becketts Malone Diesan act that didnt seem to make much sense at the time. Nietzsche somewhere speaks of an authors life as not just the womb or soil, but more often the dung or manure out of which the work sprouts. Lets just say that I had heaps of manure lying around in the years Very Little Almost Nothing was being written. But, as every gardener knows, manure is excellent fertilizing material and the book bears some blooms that I still find attractive, even if I find my prose prolix and the whole thing horribly overwritten. In this Preface to the Second Edition, Id like to provide a little context for Very Little Almost Nothing, and spell out some of its ideas that I still value and, more importantly perhaps, still use.

Very Little Almost Nothing is thus an act of mourning. It is dedicated to my father, and my memory of his deaths head is the perhaps ultimately senseless source of the books attempted sense-making. My fathers last days were long and agonizing, where my mother, sister and I took turns to sit sleepless watching him drift in and out of awareness surrounded by the death-rattle of oxygen cylinders through which he kept trying to catch hold of the breath that was slowly leaving him. Having survived Christmas, as was his stubbornly-held wish, he was taken into the local hospice for respite care so that we could all take a break and get some sleep. As he was being lifted into the ambulance, he caught my eye and extended his hand. He held my hand in his for a few seconds and nodded without speaking. There was something definitive in this gesture. I drove back home, some 70 miles away, thinking of how bony and small his hand felt and how changed it was from the large and warm hands that I remembered from childhood. During that night, his condition worsened and early next morning my sister called me to say that he was dying. Driving like a fou, I missed his death by twenty minutes and found everyone gathered silently in the hospice waiting room. A nurse took me in to see him and then left me alone. The room was unlit and sparsely furnished. In the pale winter light, he lay with a single sheet covering his corpse: tiny, withered and ravaged by cancer. I spent no more than five minutes alone with him, initially standing petrified, then sitting, and finally summoning up the courage to touch his cheek and nose and caress his forehead. It felt cool. So, this is what death looks like, I thought. This is what my death will look like. The kernel of this book is an attempt to make sense of those few minutes, of the death that I saw in my father, an attempted sense-making that doubtless fails, but where what matters is the attempt.

By virtue of my profession and passion, the way in which I attempt to make sense of my fathers death and the events that surround it is philosophically, that is to say, theoretically and indirectly. If I had the ability, then I might have hoped that my existential manure would flower into a story, novel or poem. But I dont and it didnt. What it became instead is a book that attempts to understand the significance of death for philosophy, that is, for the way in which human beings reflect upon questions and problems of the most general, imponderable and burningly important kind. There is an ancient Ciceronian wisdom that says to philosophize is to learn how to die, but learning how to die also tells us something about philosophizing.