The Book of the Die. Luke Rhinehart

express and feel emotions that we may not in fact feel. Then, when we become dimly aware that we’re not feeling the appropriate emotion, society urges us to feel guilty about it.

      It is at least conceivable that societies might exist that react to human death in entirely different ways than those we are mostly familiar with. Most other mammals, for example, are not particularly upset by the death of a mate or sibling; a few sniffs at the corpse and then off to look into getting some dinner. In wartime or in times of mass plagues, societies have been forced to treat the deaths of its citizens like the deaths of animals: the bodies must be dealt with quickly and that is about it. I think we can conceive of a society treating the death of an individual like the falling of a leaf: a natural event neither to be grieved nor celebrated.

      

       Every man is a load of firewood; the question is not whether we are going to be destroyed but with what kind of fire and light we will burn.

       A PARABLE OF ONE MAN’S DYING

      Two men were visiting an old friend, almost seventy years old, at his home where the man was seriously ill with what the doctors diagnosed as cancer. After exchanging a few polite remarks with the old man the first friend leaned towards the bed and asked sombrely: ‘So how’s it going these days, old friend?’

      ‘I’m dying, Jack, that’s how it’s going,’ the old man replied pleasantly.

      ‘Oh, no,’ said the second friend. ‘Don’t be silly. You’ll be out swimming again in a couple of weeks.’

      ‘Could be,’ said the old man. ‘But right now I’m dying.’

      ‘Nonsense,’ said the first friend. ‘You look great.’

      ‘Could be,’ said the old man cheerfully. ‘But right now I’m dying.’

      ‘Oh, come on,’ said the second friend. ‘You look as happy as if you’d just won the lottery.’

      ‘Well, that’s natural enough,’ said the old man. ‘I feel pretty good.’

      ‘Feeling pretty good!? I thought you said you’re dying?’

      ‘Oh, I’m dying all right,’ replied the old man, ‘and I feel pretty good.’

      ‘But –’ began the first friend.

      ‘I find I’m enjoying dying just as much as everything else that comes along.’

      ‘But –’ began the second friend.

      ‘Bit better, matter of fact,’ concluded the old man, smiling. ‘Every day the doctor lets me have ice cream.’

      Naked came I out of my mother’s womb and naked shall I return thither: the Lord Chance giveth and the Lord Chance taketh away: blessed by the name of the Lord.

       – from OLD TESTAMENT (REVISED VERSION)

      That I am writing The Book of the Die today is an accident. Or rather a series of accidents. That I am alive today has taken a million tiny decisions and tiny events that have permitted me to escape the hundred opportunities Death has had to remove me. Most of the times Death almost gets us, we are unaware of. We hesitate before leaving the house to finish a cup of coffee. Had we not hesitated eleven point two seconds we would have been involved in a fatal car accident.

      Our evading Death, or rendezvousing with Death, begins with what might be called the First Accident: our conception. My own father was ravaged by cancer in his mid-thirties and was dead by forty. When I was conceived – how many little coincidences went into his even making love to my mother that particular night – thousands of his sperm swam up the great vaginal river and one of them arrived a millisecond before hundreds of others. Whammo! I was conceived. But did the genes in that sperm contain the tendency to cancer that was to kill my father in another nine years? Or was it one of the only 4 per cent of his sperm that was free of the gene that predisposes a human to cancer? By accident, now almost thirty years older than the age at which my father was afflicted with cancer, I still remain free.

      And then there are some times when we become frighteningly aware that Death had us in his grip but for some reason let go. Thirty years ago Death had me and my entire family so firmly in his clutches that I apologized to my wife for killing her and our sons, since it was I that had led us to our obvious doom. But Accident spared us.

      It began just after I’d finished writing The Dice Man and mailed it off to the English publisher who had spurred me on, after four years of dawdling, to finish it. At that time I was a poverty-stricken college professor, living on the island of Mallorca, where a colleague and I had created a study abroad programme for college students interested in art and literature. Having finished my first book, I then gaily took my lifetime savings (ten thousand dollars) and bought a sailboat to live aboard that summer and cruise the Mediterranean. The decision to buy a boat was mine, but the dice had said ‘no’ to my buying a sailboat I really liked the look of in Greece. But then it didn’t veto the catamaran I bought on the south coast of France. Had the dice said ‘yes’ to the boat in Greece … I would have lived another life, or died another death.

      So my wife and my three young sons – twelve, eight and six – and I went off to Antibes, climbed aboard our squat thirty-foot cruising catamaran and prepared to sail around the Med a bit and meet my English publisher on Mallorca in late July to discuss the manuscript of The Dice Man. We sailed east along the French Riviera to Nice and Genoa and then south down the coast of Italy and then west to Corsica and west again to Sardinia and then prepared to sail across three hundred miles of open sea to Mallorca.