My faith first wavers in the train station parking lot. It’s not really even a station—there’s no ticket booth or shaded bench, just a scythe of pavement cleaving the railroad tracks, a half-flight of concrete steps, and a gravel dugout. The train from Paris was an inrush of rolling farmland and blazing expanses of mustard and the dancing specular light of phone screens on the train car’s ceiling. The connecting station had a ticket machine, an espresso machine, and a vending machine that dispensed wedges of fresh Comté. Winding farther into the countryside, every house had a trampoline in the yard. All this bucolic wonder and you could still be bored. As we pulled into the village, I saw a pair of listless children sitting on the sun-drenched mesh of one, inhaling the scent of warm plastic.
I look for habits. Would they wear habits? Lots of nuns, I read on the internet, have updated their wardrobes to include cotton skirts and tasteful khaki chore coats. A few even wear denim, to better identify with the common man. They’re invested in volunteering and protesting and cave-aging small-batch cheddar. I chose Benedictines because the order has a tradition of hospitality, and because the names of the abbeys are beautiful: Saint Mary-of-the-Woods. Sisters of Perpetual Adoration. Our Lady of Grace.
This growing body of evidence is beginning to rewrite our assumptions about death. If life can persist—or even reorganize itself—after clinical death, then what exactly does it mean to die? Perhaps this “twilight” zone isn’t an end point, but a hidden stage of life we’ve only just begun to understand.
Nock Loose is a fascinating weird book written by a very gifted person. In their scathing and hilarious Author’s Note, ‘cretin by habitat’ Patrick Marlborough avers that Australia is ’a deeply humourless country with incredibly thin skin … stretched tight over an atavistic ever-thrumming nastiness’. The result? ‘Danoz Direct, JB Hi-Fi, highway tolls, Chris Lilley, Barnaby Joyce etc.’ And now, happily, this book is their wildly entertaining, go-for-broke response to the ‘inevitable curdling of our violent colonial origins, the barbarousness of which is ongoing’.
Life is hard but books like this – books that are funny, romantic and heartwarming – remind us that it’s pretty wonderful too.