Exit Ghost Poem by gershon hepner

By paring and paring and paring away
from lives that we cannot repair or replay
the passions that helped us once love and connect
to people whose values we’ve come to reject
as they too rejected our values and passions,
conforming to quite different values and fashions
to those we had gradually come to adopt,
we learn to accept that, though time can’t be stopped,
it can be improved if we keep it diminished,
and add to our lives, well before we have finished
the process called living what’s needed the most:
instructions that help us to exit as ghost.
Michiko Kakutani (“Roth, Seeking a Moral as His Story Ends, ” NYT, October 2,2007) , reviews Philip Roth’s latest novel, Exit Ghost:
Compared with Mr. Roth’s big postwar trilogy (“American Pastoral, ” “I Married a Communist” and “The Human Stain”) , which unfolded into a bold chronicle of American innocence and disillusionment, this volume is definitely a modest undertaking, but it has a sense of heartfelt emotion lacking in “Everyman” and “Dying Animal, ” and for fans of the Zuckerman books, it provides a poignant coda to Nathan’s story, putting a punctuation point to his journey from youthful idealism and passion through midlife confusion and angst toward elderly renunciation. Although Nathan thinks he’s embraced the ascetic life — “by paring and paring and paring away, ” he says, “I found in my solitude a species of freedom that was to my liking much of the time” — he’s been living in a monkish bubble that’s cut him off from ordinary human commerce and connection. He often goes days at a time without speaking to anyone, save his housekeeper or caretaker. He doesn’t watch movies or television, doesn’t own a cellphone, a VCR, a DVD player or a computer. He continues “to live in the Age of the Typewriter, ” claiming he doesn’t know what the World Wide Web is, and no longer bothers to vote.


10/2/07