When I turned 50, I started to study flamenco. I was looking for a way to revive myself, and maybe my world, or at least part of it.

My 50th year had been cold and classic. The earth’s rotation had picked up speed. At night, star trails striped the sky. In the day, just panic. So many things I couldn’t do over. Or even just do. So little time was left. “With one’s hair flying back like the tail of a race-horse,” as Virginia Woolf wrote, “Yes, that seems to express the rapidity of life, the perpetual waste and repair; all so casual, all so haphazard.”

It was the usual story. After an early wildness, I’d doubled down on duty, and it had changed me. An exoskeleton of anxieties made it hard to move. Age had made me babyish;  I felt robbed. Every time I graded a student’s paper, I stapled on some dreams. Fine, take them. Eat me. And then, friends began to die—bodies falling apart, exploding, eating themselves, coming to an end.

That was the year my parents moved to a retirement home. Longview. My dad cracked, “No need for the long view when the story’s almost over.”

There, every day fades the same. It is like an illustration of the culture—institutional, antiseptic. Sometimes dear, mostly dreary. Nobody there feels the weather; many never leave the grounds. Nobody there goes to a dark bar where people are singing together. Nobody there is dancing.

I wanted to turn away from this future, but towards what?

Salida. Exiting.

I took some students to Highgate Cemetery. Deep in the leaves, we saw a gravestone with two epitaphs divided by a thin slash, as if one must choose either dark thought:

c’est la vie / be still

The approaching end made the days seem futile. It didn’t help that our planet was ending, too.

But, in the graveyard, I realized that I’d forgotten about Heidegger’s Sein-zum-Tode—the beautiful necessity of being-toward death. The ecstasy of possibilities provided by the future and its end. The way the death that lives inside you can take you outside yourself, and is thus not only a life force, but an ethical force, too.

Being and Time had been buried by errands. As had being and time.

Babeo. Repeated, meaningless sounds such as “bababa” in the middle of words.

One night, a friend called to say she was performing in a flamenco show with some guys from Spain and I should come. It seemed mildly embarrassing, but I went. The club vibrated recklessly. It was pounding, feverish. It was a dark mess, but the gestures pierced me like a book.

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