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EVERLASTING PIECE
Baker is a columnist for The New York Times. Siegel is an assistant to the paper's managing editor.
Obituaries these days often provide the only pleasure to be had from the daily newspaper and should be savored slowly, saved for leisurely reading over the last cup of breakfast coffee. To plunge into them first thing, before having endured the rest of the day's news, is like eating the dessert before tackling a fried-liver dinner.
What blessed relief they provide after the front page -- people butchering neighbors' wives and children to serve God, right injustice, and display cultural superiority; science announcing that everything you love to do, eat, or drink will kill you. What calm satisfactions they afford after the hospital fumes of the sports pages with their pulled hamstrings, torn knee cartilage, dislocated shoulders, ripped tendons, broken collarbones, crushed vertebrae, shattered elbows, torn rotator cuffs. There the reader must also suffer muscular hulks whining that at $3 million per year they are shamefully underpaid.
Then, at last, the obituaries. Oases of calm in a world gone mad. Stimulants to sweet memories of better times, to philosophical reflection, to discovery of life's astonishing richness, variety, comedy, sadness, of the diverse infinitude of human imaginations it takes to make this world. What a lovely part of the paper to linger in.
