Editor’s Note: We are delighted to welcome Jen Petty Hilger back to LymeLine. She wrote a very popular ‘Literature in the Lymes’ column for us until 2014.
One could suppose this is the afterlife of a book reviewer. Welcome to review Number 101 … after a brief 10-year hiatus.
Sebastian Junger is a very smart man. He is a well-educated man. He is a brave man, a well traveled man. He is a man, who has questioned death many times and faced death a few times, but until the summer of 2020 he had never truly questioned its finality. The place where his very smart brain and his very real soul intersect is what fascinates me.
This book about his literal “time of dying” is remarkable for its ability to translate the experience. If you’ve read The Perfect Storm, you know how well he captures a tale. His investigative prowess, journalistic experience and sheer narrative skill weave a fast-moving powerhouse of a story.
This time it is his own near death experience. He barely, barely, survives a ruptured aneurysm. As a an atheist, he comes at his experience from a purely scientific angle and is astounded to encounter something inexplicably outside individual consciousness.
As the medical team at the Hyannis Hospital desperately, almost impossibly, tries to transfuse enough blood to keep him alive while locating the rupture, Junger slips almost away. He sees both his dead father above him and an abyss below him. Neither is comforting nor expected.
What Junger encounters is previously unfathomable to him and he tries to wrap his mind around it while explaining, quite rationally, the arguments for and against it. While telling us in great detail, the medical trauma unfolding, he presents scientific and philosophical ideas on the biology of the spirit. He references great mathematical minds like Einstein, Schrödinger, Leibniz, and others.
From the minutiae of quantum mechanics to the greatest expanses of the known galaxies, everything we discover leads to more we don’t know. We don’t know what we don’t know. Nothing interests me more than the opening of a mind; the moment when a light turns on and the room will never be as dark as it was before.
This experience forever changed the way Sebastian Junger looks at the world. He is the first to admit it. I look forward to his writing in the future and the impact this breadth of insight will have.
About the author: Jen Petty Hilger grew up in New York and London, England, but finds herself happily quiet living by the water in Old Lyme. She and her husband have six children between them and a myriad of rescued animals.