SOMEWHERE TOWARDS THE END
By Diana Athill
Norton, 182 pp., $24.95
Diana Athill's memoir, written in her 89th year, tackles the little-documented subject of "falling away." As she is well advanced in the process, she is up to the task. She considers the subject from many angles - philosophical, religious, romantic, personal. As an editor of many great writers, Athill writes on this potentially grim subject with clarity, calm, and common sense.
On the subject of belief, she remembers a friend who rejected the idea of a first cause by saying "Might it not be that beginnings and endings are things we think in terms of simply because our minds are too primitive to conceive of anything else?" She enjoys the company of young people without imagining that they relish hers. She recognizes that we all will probably be in the position of caring for or being cared for by someone. And then she candidly describes the selfish compromises she arrived at to care for her dying mother, and the unexpected compensations she received from caring for her ailing lover. Here is part of her wonderful conclusion: "Human life . . . is amazingly capacious so that it can contain many opposites. . . . Serenity and tumult, heartbreak and happiness, coldness and warmth, grabbing and giving - and also more particular opposites such as a neurotic conviction that one is a flop and a consciousness of success amounting to smugness. . . . Most lives are a matter of ups and downs rather than of a conclusive plunge into an extreme."
