The year is 1937. Elias Canetti (July 25, 1905–August 14, 1994) — Bulgarian, Jewish, living in Austria as the Nazis are rising to power — has just lost his mother; his mother, whose bottomless love had nurtured the talent that would win him the Nobel Prize in his seventies; his mother, who had raised him alone after his father’s death when Elias was seven (the kind of “wound that turns into a lung through which you breathe,” he would later reflect).

Having left chemistry to study philosophy, trading the science of life for the art of learning to die, Canetti, aged thirty-two, decides to write a book “against” death, defying it without denying it, this shadow of life that is also its spark, the very thing that makes it shimmer with aliveness. He would work on it for the next half century until his own death, filling two thousand pages with reflections and aphorisms posthumously distilled into The Book Against Death (public library).

Perhaps Canetti’s reckoning with death is so virtuosic in articulating the potency and poignancy of life because it keeps inverting the lens from the microscopic to the telescopic and back again as he mourns his mother and mourns the world. Everything is suddenly personal, his suffering a fractal of the suffering and everyone else’s suffering a mirror image of his own.

Coming to feel that “with every destroyed city a piece of his own life falls away,” he searches for the borders of compassion and finds none:

Am I Nuremberg? Am I Munich? I am every building in which children sleep. I am every open square across which feet scurry.

And yet alongside this overwhelming brokenness, so universal and therefore so intimate, is also a greater wholeness that he is, as all visionaries are, able to glimpse through the ruins:

Above the shattered world there stretches a pure blue heaven, which continues to hold it together.

It is this blue, this color of longing for life, that saturates the meaning of life amid the darkness of death. Three years into the war, he vows:

Today I decided that I will record thoughts against death as they occur to me, without any kind of structure and without submitting them to any tyrannical plan. I cannot let this war pass without hammering out a weapon within my heart that will conquer death.

Not everyone, not even the great minds, had Canetti’s defiance. “We must love one another or die,” W.H. Auden had entreated humanity in one of the greatest poems ever written as the war was breaking out, and then, in what may be the most poignant one-word revision in the history of literature and one of the saddest in the history of the human spirit, he had rewritten that epitaphic last line in the wake of the war: “We must love one another and die.” While Auden was ceding his optimism, Muriel Rukeyser — as great a poet and a greater spirit — was celebrating a different vision of life beyond notions of triumph and defeat in one of the greatest books ever written: “All the effort, all the loneliness and death, the thin and blazing threads of reason, the spill of blessing, the passion behind these silences — all the invention turns to one end: the fertilizing of the moment, so that there may be more life.”

Canetti shares her lens on the political, but for him it is polished with the most deeply personal. In an entry from June 1942, he writes:

Five years ago today my mother died. Since then my world has turned inside out. To me it is as if it happened just yesterday. Have I really lived five years, and she knows nothing of it? I want to undo each screw of her coffin’s lid with my lips and haul her out. I know that she is dead. I know that she has rotted away. But I can never accept it as true.

[…]

Where is her shadow? Where is her fury? I will loan her my breath. She should walk on my own two legs.

Echoing Ernest Hemingway (“No one you love is ever dead,” he had written in a stirring letter of consolation to a bereaved friend) and echoing Emily Dickinson (“Each that we lose takes part of us / A crescent still abides / Which like the moon, some turbid night, / Is summoned by the tides,” she had written in her reckoning with love and loss upon her own mother’s death), Canetti contemplates the immortality of love in the living:

The souls of the dead are in others, namely those left behind… Only the dead have lost one another completely.

In the prime of his life, he is already facing the losses that loom over anyone who loves:

I want anything to do with fewer and fewer people, mainly so that I can never get over the pain of losing them.

Not knowing that in the decades ahead he would lose the love of his life, marry again and lose her too, lose his younger brother, lose a retinue of friends — some to mass murder, some to suicide, some to the entropy that will take us all if we are lucky enough to grow old — he writes from the fortunate platform of his healthy thirties:

We carry the most important thing around inside ourselves for forty or fifty years before we risk articulating it. Therefore there is no way to measure all that is lost with those who die too early. Everyone dies early.

And yet his mother’s death is precisely what awakened Canetti to life — his own life and the life of the world. (“Death is our friend,” Rilke had written when Canetti was a teenager, “precisely because it brings us into absolute and passionate presence with all that is here, that is natural, that is love.”) Beneath it all pulsates his unflinching intimacy with the elemental reality of living:

We do not die of sadness — out of sadness we live on.

At the crux of Canetti’s disquisition on the menace and meaning of death is a passionate inquiry into what it means to be alive. A decade before Edward Abbey contemplated how to live and how (not) to die and a decade after Simone de Beauvoir composed her resolutions for a life worth living, Canetti itemizes the priorities of a good life:

To live at least long enough to know all human customs and events; to retrieve all of life that has passed, since we are denied that which will come; to pull yourself together before you disappear; to be worthy of your own birth; to think of the sacrifices made at the expense of others’ every breath; to not glorify suffering, even though you are alive because of it; to only keep for yourself that which cannot be given away until it is ripe for others and hands itself on; to hate every person’s death as if it were your own, and to at last be at peace with everything, but never with death.

Complement these passages from The Book Against Death with a heron’s antidote to death, then revisit Mary Oliver on how to live with maximum aliveness, Henry Miller on the measure of a life well lived, and Alan Lightman on what happens when we die.