HARBINGER

Why foreknowledge of death? Does it only help to plan funerals? (Not that we can bear it.) To ask the patient which dress she would prefer? To feel its absent presence, always, as we cross the street against the light, as we tear open a bag of spinach, as we breathe strangely flavored air? Is it the silent running engine of ambition? A reminder to love fully, despite our primitive memory? Honestly. Why know that, and forget so much else? Or is it a dripping faucet in the kitchen of time, repeating, with maddening indifference, that one day, all experience will end? Is this simply bad taste, a bug in the program, a sneak peek at the playbook?

Some things I wish I couldn’t ask: Is it really rest, as poets say, or more like a job?

JAMES HANNAHAM