In a profile of William T. Vollmann, Tom Bissell paints a vivid picture of an author whose interests range from war reporting to sex work to government surveillance (he was once suspected of being the Unabomber). He quotes Vollmann pondering mortality:
Vollmann stressed that in writing Last Stories, he really wanted to face up to death’s psychological challenges. Death, he said, “is nothing, and therefore the only way we can engage with nothing is to personify it … to invent.” For Vollmann, facing up to the inevitability of death involves remembering the orange he ate in his Bosnian rental while his friends sat dead in the front seats. “It was a hot day,” he said. “I was really thirsty. I ducked down and I was peeling one of these oranges and thought, ‘This is probably the last thing I’m ever going to eat.’ ” Twenty years later, when he gets upset about something, he wills himself to remember that orange and the strange reassurance it offered. Any type of permanent consciousness in the afterlife would, he believes, inevitably devolve into torture, and there would be no parting orange to leaven it. Consciousness is to our mortality what beer is to Homer Simpson: the cause of, and solution to, all our problems.
“Where does consciousness come from?” Vollmann asked, and it took me a moment to recognize he really was asking. I told him I didn’t have the faintest idea. Neither did Vollmann. “It makes no sense to me. None of it makes sense. It’s all preposterous, no matter how I look at it.” I reminded him that his first novel, You Bright and Risen Angels, seems to suggest that the collectivist social intelligence of insects might be preferable to the disquieting solitude of human intelligence—and it was possible that Vollmann spent more time alone in his head than any other living American writer. “Maybe,” he said, “it’s not so bad to be a social insect.”
The Dish 