H.L. Hix: The Death of H.L. Hix
H.L. Hix
We want affirmation that our lives were worth it. We we want things like legacy. We want to live on in some way, through children, through our work, through whatever some we want things to outlast us. That's a mode of valuing, of wanting to have done something valuable and and so a part of what, a part of what HL Hicks is coming to terms with in the book when he's faced with his own death is, you know what? Actually, you know, I want to be remembered, but I'm not gonna be
Tayo Basquiat
welcome to the study podcast, a virtual room for thought where there is always room for you. I'm Teo, and today I'm going to be talking death with poet and philosopher H L Hicks. So I'd like to start on a personal note in that while your writing and your teaching spans poetry, literary criticism, essays, philosophy, hybrid genres, translation, no doubt, some that I am forgetting, I have asked you here today to talk about your first fiction endeavor, a little novella that's already several books in The rear view for you, it came out in 2021 and the personal part of this is that in that same year, in May, I resigned my job in late July, my dad died in September, my mom went through a major surgery and had this rehabilitation, long recovery to endure. And then in November, I was turning 50, and I have always been a person who has really turned to the outdoors, to nature, to physical movement in order to process what I'm thinking and feeling. And so I had decided that for my 50th I was going to do this bicycle trip through landscapes of death, and I was going to go from an English dead man's journey trail, historic trail in New Mexico, and then the Devil's Highway in Arizona is going to end up in Death Valley in California. And I made my way from North Dakota down southwest via Laramie and stopped to see you and Kate, and I was a wreck. I was numb. I was exhausted. I just yeah, you received a wreck, and you gifted me this book that you've agreed to talk about, and you had wrapped it up in this little brown paper, and you'd presented me at dinner with this gift, and the title of the book was the death of HL Hicks, authored by hl Hicks, translated by hl Hicks, edited and with an introduction by hl Hicks. And I cannot imagine more synchronicity than that you had, you had come out with this book, and it became my literary companion for that peddling meditation. And I just, I can't believe the synchronicity, really, of that gift of love. So thank you for being willing to talk about this wonderful novella, and let me get out of the way and start asking you about this book. So this reimagines Leo Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich, and it casts yourself fictionally as the protagonist. When did you first encounter Tolstoy's story and what inspired you to write your version?
H.L. Hix
Yeah, I mean, I guess that's one of those books that you sort of know about even before you've read it, like the just the title, like everybody knows the title, Hamlet, whether you've seen a performance or read it or not. And I think it's one of those things that everybody sort of you're aware of. Of this particular book, whether you've read it or not. And so so I can't remember not being aware of the book, just from sort of the title, which, which, of course, gives the plot. There's no surprise ending. I um, and I don't actually remember the first time that I read it, but there's something you know, as as you just said about the synchronicity, this story of a person's death, it it changes in intensity for us that depending on our life circumstances and forms of awareness and so. So for all your you know generosity and modesty and just saying, a second ago, let me get out of the way that that's of course, what you know this is, this is what I'm hoping for, is exactly the synchronicity that you just so beautifully articulated, that that somehow or other, this version of somebody else's story of somebody else's death that felt like my story of my death can also be for someone else, for the reader, a way of narrating their own death to themselves. How can we understand this, this fact, every one of us is going to die. Most of us have already everyone but, but all of us who are still alive are going to die. You know, if it's if it's the most universal thing about humans, it's also this. It's also the hardest thing for us to come to terms with, to to understand and to acknowledge and accept and and so so for them, for that synchronicity to happen, for for from my version of this, to connect in some meaningful way with your version of it, that nothing, nothing could be more beautiful to me. I'll never have another experience in relation to this book happier than hearing you say what you just said this. It's such a beautiful thing for this to be a way of we share this we share this characteristic we are, you know, both of us are mortal, and so to be able to share somehow or Other, to share aspects of our stories with one another seems to me really valuable and beautiful
Tayo Basquiat
when you frame it in the connection of a relationship around around, an experience that intellectually right? So, so you teach philosophy? I don't know if you would claim to be a philosopher or not, but beside the point, there's there's this history right in philosophy, where there's the encouragement to contemplate your mortality and comes up in all different shapes and forms along the ages, but it's this thing that you know about intellectually, and you can make the thought experiment about it, but it takes you know the death of a parent certainly sharpens it right? Or if you're sitting in the doctor's office and suddenly it's like you have cancer. So then mortality, your death, is sharpened in this whole other way that I think that your book, as much as it's an imagined thought exercise, there's so much about imagining the death. And I keep reminding myself, this is a work of fiction, but, but you keep imagining as the protagonist of this, you get so into the vividness and the excruciating detail of what It means to die. So you know, was there anything in your life? Because, because the obituary that this book announces at the be the opening HL Hicks, 59 so like, Was there something that said, this is the time? I'm going to write this, this story in my life.
H.L. Hix
Yeah, it's that was the age that I was as I was writing it. That is, that is an age at which one, I suspect that many people are, you know, are either trying to face up to their mortality or are working really hard to deny it? Yeah, you know, we're all like frenetically taking taking more exercise and eating better or something, you know anything to deny this fact about myself? But yeah, it's, it's an age at which you know all kinds of things begin to to happen. One one becomes aware of relationship to family history. So if I, if I look at my father and his father before him, both of them, relatively speaking, healthy lives, but both of them circulatory system. Both of them had major heart surgeries in later adulthood and died ultimately of circulatory issues, one of essentially heart failure and one of a stroke. So family history tells me that my best case scenario is mid 80s, relative, comparatively, speaking, to to the average person's sort of genetic luck, comparatively speaking, good health, mid 80s and, and I'll have either the heart attack or a stroke And, and so what that means to me right now is I got 20 years and the clock's ticking, and that's that's the good scenario that that that doesn't it doesn't count. It doesn't allow for possibilities like car wreck. There has been a car fatality in my family by marriage that doesn't allow for things like what had not been part of my family history. I have a cousin who was younger than me, who in her very early 60s. Family History says the females on my mother's side of the family live into their 90s, but this cousin, who was on my mother's side of the family died of cancer in her very early 60s, and so, so there are, I don't know that you can you reach a certain age and and it just gets harder to deny. It just gets harder to not think about in the way that you know when you're young, you can, you can just not think about it, your your body works okay there, there seems no imminent danger. You might not know anybody who's died, but you reach our age, and parents have died, and schoolmates have died, and colleagues at work have died, and and so yeah, it's, I guess it was time for me to think about it at last. And But your point part of what I'm hearing you say about them, the book and about this, this fact of humanity is thinking about it doesn't just automatically become coming to terms with it, because there, there is some sense in which we All, we can all think about it, you know, cerebrally, front of the mind stuff, we can, we can think about it without thinking about it. You know, say the words, I am a human. Humans are mortal. Mortals die. I will die. But that rote logical statement, I don't think that counts as coming to terms with it. There's something much more in some. Deeper part of the brain and some larger part of one's sensibilities in this is something visceral about it, and so, so that's a part of the part of my hope for the book is, yeah, I'm a person who I've been in school since I was four years old, I've been in school. You know, Ispend the greater part of my life either reading books or writing them. You know, I spend a lot of my I have spent,I am spending. I do spend, I will spend. I spent a lot of time in my head, you know, doing,doing thinking, but and I affirm thinking, thinking is important, I wouldn't. I wouldn't have spent my life doing it. If I didn't think it was important, I wouldn't. I wouldn't be teaching philosophy if I didn't think thinking was important, but, but thinking has to connect with life, with reality, with who one is, and and so You know, in the ways that you just said much more smartly and concisely than I have been trying to say. There's this connection to be made between the strictly cognitive,I'm a mortal, I will die, and the Oh my,I feel something I'm aware of this in a way I was not aware of this before.
Tayo Basquiat
Yeah, I wholeheartedly agree that, you know, philosophy in some ways, you didn't say this, but it's been my impression that the ancient philosophical traditions and some of their branches were much more practically oriented toward the question of, how do we live? Well, right? And then philosophy kind of lost its way in the, you know, sort of the logical positivism or just like, oh my goodness, does this matter at all? So, like, there's just, I have always appreciated philosophy that can serve in the role of guide psychologist all of these like, how do I solve this problem? And and that's what I basically was, the literary experience of this book, for me, was a way to enter into something that I was resisting, something I had just been shocked by, and then faced with myself, you know, the confrontation of all right, I'm on deck. You know, like once, once your parents go, then you're like, I'm on deck. So as you were saying, let's get into some of this, some of the things that you do bring up, and I'm not going to there is a spoiler, because, yes, it's in the title. This is what happens. But I don't want to spoil some of the enjoyment of just experiencing this book for what I hope will be a lot of listeners that run out and get it. I found this book deeply funny, and it is so playful in humor, just like the humor abounds, and other people might read it and be like, I do not understand the humor at all, maybe, but I found it deeply funny, and at the same time, the humor is often pointed, very it's self deprecating, disparaging. There's this thematic running through of just how ordinary H L Hicks's life is, and how ordinary the cause of his demise, and how ordinary the choices of his wardrobe, hairstyles, you know? And so there's, it's funny, but it's also it brings up that, you know, in the review that we do of our lives in our 50s, maybe it happens earlier, but you're like, Yeah, I'm I'm maybe not gonna fly as high as I'd hoped in life, right? And so when you were writing that those kinds of things, and kind of the assessment of and it happens through various characters as well that you bring in, but also, you know, HL Hicks, his own review of it. Can you talk about that a little bit?
H.L. Hix
Yeah, no. I mean, it certainly is. It's another feature of this moment of reflection, or disposition towards reflection about one's mortality, is that it. Not only a kind of stare down, so, you know, at some point, death stares you in the face and you either look away or you try to stare back. And so, you know, I hope this is an attempt to, you know, to stare back and and see what's coming. But it's also a mode of evaluation. So, so, you know, we evaluate things in many ways and and we, we can apply many different tests to our forms of evaluation. You know, does the value judgment that I make line up with the 10 Commandments? Does the value judgment that I make is that, you know, whatever religious or community idea you know philosophers have come up with various niet had a kind of delightful, funny way of you. Know, his sense was, if, if you wouldn't choose to do whatever you're doing over and over again until through all eternity, then what are you doing it now for which is this kind of like, it's a funny that it's got some punch to it. It is an interesting question. Yeah, right, well, if I wouldn't do this again, why am I doing it now that it's so so there's something that's really helpful and and thoughtful about it, and I think one's own mortality does the same thing. How can you not ask if you're if you're sort of facing up to your own mortality, recognizing, acknowledging, some way, your own mortality. Then a part of what that also means is I don't got time to get everything done that I thought I might DID I DO what actually was relatively more important instead of what was relatively less important? And so I may be asked that question a little bit more intensely when I'm confronted with my own death than I do on a, you know, random, unthinking morning and and so. So it's, it becomes a time of broader reflection, if you're, if you're coming in terms of, you know, mortality. And we, we know this. We know this happens. We see it when we're young. We see it in older people. We want affirmation that our lives were worth it. We We want things like legacy we want, we want to live on in some way, through children, through our work, through whatever some we want things to outlast us. That's a mode of valuing, of wanting to have done something valuable and and so a part of what, a part of what HL Hicks has come into terms with in in the book, when he's faced with his own death, is, you know what? Actually, you know I want to be remembered, but I'm not gonna be the the I want. HL Hicks is a professor. I want my students to love me and remember me, but, but the the colleagues, the colleagues who died three years ago there. There aren't any students anymore on campus who remember them. Faculty colleagues remember them, but there aren't any students on campus anymore. They're students that they taught now, adults going on, etc, but you disappear from campus. Fast, really fast, and, and, and. So it's just, you know, same, same kind of thing you you know, if you write books like I write books, you see, you see, you know, a few books every year that lots of people buy and read and talk about, but, but not mine, and so, so you, you, you start to when you're coming in terms of your mortality, I think you also have to come to terms with, yeah, what I was doing as I was tempering my expectations, was also I wasn't just preparing against future disappointment. I was also recognizing that what I did the ultimate value. You of what I did won't live up to the value that it had for me at the moment I was doing it, and maybe the value that I hoped that it had, it actually just doesn't have. And so, so that's, that's, uh, I'm reminded of a favorite line from a movie that I won't say the whole thing because involves it includes a word that one shouldn't say on air. So I'll skip that word. But there's, in the movie Pulp Fiction, there's a line where one of the characters says to another, that's a hard, blankety, blank fact of life, and and I think that one will die is a hard fact of life, and that one's life doesn't have the value for others or the ultimate cosmic value that it has for oneself. I mean, my life is that's all I got. It's everything to me, but it's nothing to the world. And so there's that's a hard fact. Wow, that's a hard fact. And poor HL Hicks, in this book, is trying to he's kind of forced to come to terms with it.
Tayo Basquiat
Yeah, no choice at that junction, right? Which is to guess one of the reasons that you know to think about your death is so often counseled by philosophers is that maybe by doing so, you could make some changes while you still maybe have some time, like, as you opened up with we don't know, like, this could be it for you and me after This, we just That's it. But still, you know, when people do get the diagnosis, or somebody dies in a in a car accident and they're just gone, then you are left, left with this grasping for, what did it all mean, and was it enough? And did I put myself in doing the things that were important, and, and, and I, and I liked it, as hard as it was, is as much as like, again, this is fiction, but as much as I know you, I just wanted to push back and go, No, you aren't. This was important. You know, I like that. You kind of have the book there that that's that, that is, that's what the story is doing. I think it's a much more common experience for humans than I am the one that's going to have, you know, giant statue made of me put in the middle of the town square or something. So I guess, even before that, and maybe related to it, you wrote something as HL Hicks, the editor writing the introduction notes that HL Hicks had perhaps discovered a new genre, and the new genre is autobiography, is wicked twin automortography And wow, that just smacked me outside the head. Talk a little bit about that. I just think that is so arresting and thought provoking.
H.L. Hix
Yeah, part of what, part of what HL hates is trying to sort out is facing up to one's death. I think maybe includes, oh yeah, this recognition that I thought I was telling the story of my life, but, but maybe the story of my life is the story of my death and and if a part of what I'm understanding by means of this value judgment that I'm making, this assessing, you know, did I do? What was meaningful? Did what I did, what I did, have value, you know, a part of the recognition, I think then is, oh, oh, right, I wasn't who I thought I was. I certainly wasn't who I wanted to be, and apparently I wasn't who I thought I was. But once you're in that mode of reflection and trying to think about it and face up to these sort of hard questions and hard facts, if I wasn't who I thought I was before,then am I who I think I am now? And. And and if the answer if I wasn't who I thought I was, and if I'm not who I think I am, then I'm in a perplexing situation. My identity is not so fixed and secure as I wish it were, as I would like for it to be. So we then begin to recognize that, oh, yeah, right. People adopt all kinds of strategies to try to fix their identity and to be sure they're who they are. You know, I want it. I want other people to echo it back to me and so persons who do what they do in order to get fame and power, and it just takes a lot of other people confirming all the time. It takes a lot of yes men to, you know, confirm that one is who one thinks one is, and so fame, you know, one's legacy, one's children and and so on. Will. My children will confirm that I'm who I am, my my work will and but HL Hicks is not persuaded anymore that that any of those confirmations are reliable. You know, death, there's death staring one down. So, yeah, so, so HL Hicks is trying to, trying to think that thought. And it's a funny thought. It it's, it's absolutely as grim and terrifying, and I'll do anything to deny this. Please tell me it's not true. It's all those things but, but it's also, it's also funny. What absurd creatures we are. We seem to be. You know, sure, it looks like we're the only ones. Well, maybe that's not true. I mean, but, you know, we we observe animals grieving and and so on. So, so this, maybe this is an exaggeration, but we seem to be more preoccupied with this than other creatures seem to be. Earthworms give no clues. We can recognize that they worry about the fact that they don't live so long. And, you know, and don't never achieve fame and power and money in the bank and and so, so there's, there's something that's really funny about our ways of dealing with this. We are comical entities, you and you and me and our in certainly an absurd figure.
Tayo Basquiat
He's He's very funny, almost to the very end of the book. You have a section where there's a series of what if questions and around someone's imminent death, like, if you have the moment, there is this. I even do it now, even as I'm trying to push death away as far as it can get, I think about, well, what if I had done this at that juncture in my life instead of what I did do and, you know, what if I could get that moment over again? You know, so my what ifs have this very Road Not Taken self doubt, hypothetical. HL Hicks is what ifs are different than that, and the the last one that is in this series. I remember when I was I read this book a few times. It's a long bicycle ride a few times because it's a short book, but there's lots to think about. And one of the last what ifs was, is this what if my whole life has been false, and the most false thing about it was my pretense, my delusion that I could secure something true. I don't even know what to do with that. It's just. And some might just, some people might just be like, Oh, just go grab a beer or something. Why don't you, you know? And like, stop thinking so so much, right? Man, yeah. But there, there is a folly to the whole enterprise, that while you know, you maybe don't want to drive into the ditch of nihilism on it, embracing this folly around certitude, that we could get it right. You know that we've got this one shot on the planet or something, and and we can get it right, and I believe that I can make all the right moves and think all the right things. And, you know, maybe that's the greatest folly of the folly of it all. You know, I don't know where did from? Where did the series of what ifs arise that land on that page, there's a number. I didn't count them all, but it's a good number. HL Hicks is thinking about,
H.L. Hix
yeah, yeah. HL Hicks, the HL Hicks, the editor and translator, not only HL Hicks, the subject, protagonist of the book, wonders, some of these, what if questions too? Yeah, I'm, I mean, I I just, I think they're live questions. I i doubt that there are definitive sorts of answers to them, answers that make them stop being questions. There are forms of their forms of self deception, that can persuade us to stop asking them,but, but it makes for a very, I think a very, I think it's not only terrifying, it is terrifying, but it's not only terrifying, there's something, yes, there's something terrifying about that. It's not, it's not that there are a series of perfect life choices and you just got them wrong. You just made bad decisions when there were, there were right decisions to be made, and you made the wrong ones. Tough luck. It's not that there weren't right decisions and wrong decisions. They're all contextualized and related to the lives of others. And it just doesn't work that way, that there's a everything is a yes or no, everything's a fork in the road and you either take the right one or you take the wrong one. It just that's just not how things are. But, and so that means, that means, on the one hand, that means something terrifying that everybody's going to get to the end of their lives and think, you know, how'd I do? You know, did I was I sort of relatively okay, or did I really botch that terribly? But it also means there's so there's something terrifying about the poetry tells us, right? The famous poem, Shelley's famous poem, Ozymandias, you know I am Ozymandias, King of Kings. Look on my works, ye mighty and despair. And we all know. We all know people, persons in power, who think they, who think that all should look on their works there and despair, but, but the end of the poem is, you know, round the pedestal the lone and level sands stretch far away, and so, so a part of what we know is, oh yeah, it's true. I I didn't get fame, so I thought, when I was a young writer, I thought, oh yeah, I'll, I'll be a famous writer. You know that that's what writer writers are. Famous writers. It's just, it's like one word. It should be hyphenated. I'm going to be a famous writer. Oh well, now I'm nearing death, and I'm a writer, but I'm not a famous writer. Um, but, but, oh, wait a minute, all the famous people, it's not going to be very long before they're not famous either, and they're all going to be just as dead as me. And so. So there's something on the one hand, there's something that's terrifying. There are no choices you can make that will erase your mortality. But that also means nobody else has made any of those choices that erase their mortality, and all these ways that people think they are doing it aren't doing it, and and they're all, all the rich famous people are going to be in just a few years, they're going to be just as dead as you and me. There's a bunch of people who were rich and famous during my adult lifetime who are already deader than I am, and so so that. But it means there's something funny about that too. There's something terrifying. Thing, because that's what's going to happen to me soon. But there's something that's also funny. Ah, oh, you know what, we are absurd. And why can't we deal with this and look at the funny things we do to try not to? Yeah, so, I hope the book does capture something of that perplexity. You know, there's a sort of branch of philosophy that that called labels it absurdity. You could label it perplexity. Befuddlement, right? Is befuddling these questions that are they're live questions they bear on our lives and who we are and what has value, but they're not susceptible to definitive answer and so so it means they're befuddling they matter, but they're just going to stay there. They're going to continue to matter, but then they're going to continue to refuse to be settled for us. So, so, yeah, absurd, perplexing, befuddling and HL Hicks. HL Hicks recognizes that his life has been absurd, and recognizes that these questions are perplexing, and recognizes, he recognizes that he's befuddled. You know, he hasn't, he hasn't arrived at the culminating vision, capacious vision of the world, that is wisdom. You know, the radiant wisdom, the glowing halo of old age and and wisdom. He's just a befuddled body. He's just befuddled.
Tayo Basquiat
Yeah, the the more in my own life I can stay close to absurdity, like an understanding of absurdity, the more freeing I find it. I get so bothered by certitude, and when I land in its grips, it does it does me no good ever. So I just have a couple more questions for you. One is in a way in which you clearly departed from Tolstoy's version of the story, which comes from again, HL Hicks. The Editor notes that HL Hicks, the protagonist had a tendency to over structure his works. And you do have a structure built into this that is precedes every chapter. You have a word that you define, there's an etymology, there's an annotation that is wrapped into HL Hicks in in some form. But then there are additions as we get deeper and deeper into it. There's a there's a rhythm or a riddle that repeats. There's a an aphorism that repeats, maybe what I'd call a colic or refrain. Toward the end, the kidney is delivering some insights, like, there's is, it's just delightful, and it's, it's something that you're doing that Tolstoy doesn't do. It's like story internal to the story that's going on. So did you maybe talk a little bit about what's going on with that?
H.L. Hix
Yeah, yeah, those those things that get repeated all they are all things that have resonance for me in some way, and and so all the HL hickses are all trying to sort of think about these, these things and so they're, they're ways of, sort of manipulating or riffing on stuff that has mattered to me, sort of through my adult life. So the the little first one is some variation on a the British poet William Blake, one of his books has a series of what he calls proverbs from Hell, though this that first one in the little sequence in the pattern is always a riff on one of those little short aphorisms from Blake's proverbs of hell. One of them is that you know the next one is there's a line in. The philosopher Ludwig bichmann Stein's philosophical investigations. There's a line where he says he observes that a wheel that can be turned though nothing else moves with it is not part of the mechanism and so, so it's this, you know, series of riffs on that, because HLX thought he was part of the mechanism, and he's realizing that he's maybe, maybe wasn't, and and so same with each of them, the the Julian of Norwich's sentence that's that's often quoted, all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well. And this has a special resonance for me, because when I was an undergraduate at the period of my life, that that I would describe as growing up trying to come to think for myself and to have a spiritual life of one's own and so on. A very influential person for me was a professor with whom I had several classes British lit seminar and a class on the Romantics and so on. And she F Janet Wilson, her name, may she rest in peace. You know, wonderful, lovely person, and she would often quote in class over the course of many semesters, when I had her as a professor, I don't know how many times she quoted that sentence to the class, always in some context. Always is in connection with what we were reading. And so, so it's one of those things that that I carry with me, you know, she and she installed it in my being, and and, so, yeah, so HL Hicks is thinking about that too. So all of those little moments are moments that seem they feel to me like little little ways of prying open a little crack onto seeing on the scene, through onto a larger Vista.
Tayo Basquiat
Yeah, they're just wonderful. And again, like, you can pause it at each one of them for so long, you know, as you're thinking about that. So, like, I don't know about that? Editor, HL Hicks means I think the structure is a good one. All right, so last question for you, what effect or change in you did writing this book have?
H.L. Hix
Wow? Yeah, interesting question. Um, yeah, maybe, maybe I would change and say other things as I reflected further on the question, but I think my just knee jerk response is more, I guess it's, I guess it's an ultra simple kind of response, Some, some form of acceptance. Yeah, maybe, maybe it's, maybe it's ultra simple and ultra basic, a kind of it the writing the book helped facilitate, at least, I don't know if it would count quite as an embrace,
Tayo Basquiat
fair enough.
H.L. Hix
Yes, I'm not one, you know, not anxious to head there, but yeah, maybe, there was, maybe the writing of the book helped in the coming to terms with the acceptance in the sense of acquiescence too. Yeah, it's it, it, it is going to happen. And kind of wish I had gotten more done. Maybe this is an oddity or a paradox about trying to write something like this that does try to face up to to one's death. Is that the the consciousness, and maybe this is the, what silver lining? Um. Um, yeah, this is an this is an attempt to be articulate to myself about this hard fact that I have lived best case scenario. I've lived three quarters of my life, and last quarter is going to be more limited physically, and so on and so on. And so there's something that's very hard about that, and something that's very hard about the value judgments that come along with it. But there's also something that is beautiful, because it comes with it comes with something else, a deep gratitude, a deep gratitude for how there's some better word than lucky I have been. There's a deep gratitude. One of the value judgments is I wouldn't trade with nobody. How could I be more grateful? I don't know what one could wish for to be more grateful about and so so I'm, yeah, I'm sad and terrified about my death, but I'm so grateful for what life is at the moment. May stop being very soon, but is at the moment, and has been, you know, something for which shame on me if I were not grateful and and so, yeah, I'm scared. I'm terrified. Man, terrified. It's hard but, but beautiful. You know, I'm just grateful. Yeah, I'm just grateful.
Tayo Basquiat
My thanks to the lovely HL Hicks and to you for joining me in the study today. Before you go, we'd love to welcome you into the wider work of the study. Head to the study, nd.org for free and low cost, online classes, lectures, living history performances, study clubs and other ways to curate your own study practice on your own terms. Join us when you can and bring a friend to.