A reviewer should always declare a bias and I admit that I have a prejudice in favour of Raymond Tallis, one of that increasingly rare breed, an expert who has moved beyond his own field, while in doing so importing an authority that is both original and enlightening. Tallis is a former professor of geriatric medicine, which qualifies him well to consider mortality. In The Black Mirror he contemplates his own mortality from the imagined vantage point of his extinction. A kind of existential memento mori with his own subjective being taking the place of the skull on the desk.
His premise is that “the thought of our nonexistence may save us from triviality, from entrapment in secondary things”. All praise to him for that. The steady march of capitalism, which gifted us the Pandora’s box of huge choice, inclines us to take too anxious an attitude to trivia. Most perniciously, material trivia. As Auden put it: “In headaches and in worry/ Vaguely life leaks away”, and Tallis’s project is to restore a sense of the miraculous in the everyday (by no means the same as the ordinary). “How can I be astonished at the miracle of a Wednesday afternoon?” he asks. It turns out quite easily, though this kind of ability goes with a certain quality of character, which, I suspect, is inborn rather than learned.
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