STILLNESS IN THE ROAR OF EXPERIENCE

An ailing man attempts to pin down the secret of life in Chan’s philosophical debut memoir.

The author is sick: He requires dialysis due to an issue with his kidneys. Rather than walling him off from the world, however, Chan’s sickness has made him more attuned to life’s minutiae. He regards his dialysis as a kind of enforced mindfulness practice: “When I pushed the needles in,” he writes, “my thinking was summarily stopped and purged—the needling demanded all my attention. Any frivolous thoughts that flowed through my mind were quickly burned and wiped away.” In these 329 short sections, reminiscent of the chapters of the Tao Te Ching, the author muses on the nature of existence and its many mysteries. The death of his mother after a two-week illness helps him to realize how slippery reality becomes for the dying—how the living mingle with ghosts, and how everything that has gone returns near the end. The sight of three deer and a few rabbits in the midst of a snowy industrial park strikes Chan with the force of a religious vision, leaving him longing for the wordless existence of animals. His wife of 40 years, E., who lovingly assists him with his treatments, is a frequent source of wonder who evokes the enigmas of love, memory, companionship, time, and more. The author approaches the beauty and incomprehensibility of life in a way that feels neither pretentious nor willfully naïve. Most of the chapters are short and philosophical rather than narrative, drawing their power from the glimpses of Chan’s real life and his measured, elegant prose: “No matter our circumstances, our awareness went on at full tilt. It was true even for a sick man like me, or perhaps especially a sick man. And then, on days that I did not dialyze, I went shopping for food or out walking somewhere, pretending as best I could that I was not a sick man.” Both the healthy and sick will find much here to ponder.

A hypnotic collection of crystalline thoughts on the nature of living.