Mortality

This week we'll look at two stories, plus another partial chapter of his unpublished autobiography, that deal with mortality, and the question of a person's legacy.  Mitchell must have been precocious for dealing with such weighty topics while in his thirties and forties, or perhaps he was just depressed.  As a child, Mitchell was traumatized by Baptist preachers warning of the torments of hell for sinners; this was referenced in a line he wrote late in life which we read last week in Street Life:  "Or it might be some horrifying or unnerving or humiliating thought that came into my mind while I was lying awake in the middle of the night and that keeps coming back—some thought about the swiftness of time in its flight, for example, or about old age itself, or about death in general and death in particular, or about the possibility (which is far more horrifying to me than the possibility of a nuclear war) that after death many of us may find out (and quite rudely, too, as a friend of mine who was lying on his deathbed in a hospital at the time once remarked) that the eternal and everlasting flames of Hell actually exist."