Thomas Lynch

Bodies in Motion and at Rest

Winner of the 2000 Great Lakes Book Award for general non-fiction—a collection of essays in which Thomas Lynch, the prize judges said, "continues his exploration of the human condition with humor and insight and his constant search for what Hemingway called 'the one true word.'"

Thomas Lynch, called a cross between Garrison Keillor and William Butler Yeats, reminds us not only of how we die but also of how we live.

"The facts of life and death remain the same. We live and die, we love and grieve, we breed and disappear. And between these existential gravities, we search for meaning, save our memories, leave a record for those who will remember us." So writes Thomas Lynch, poet and funeral director, and author of the highly praised The Undertaking, winner of an American Book Award and finalist for the National Book Award, as he continues to examine the relations between the "literary and mortuary arts."

The essays assembled here explore the human condition at the intersection of millennia, beleaguered by choices and changes, encumbered by mergers and acquisitions, numbed by math and technologies, in search of the meaning of life and time, our lives and times. Lynch tenders life and time—sextons, muckrakers, clergy, caskets, condoms, loved poems, a hated cat, the mall, the Main Street. In an age that seeks to define human experience in retail, high-tech, or pop-psyche terms, these essays speak to the existentials: between human being and ceasing to be, between birth and death, we are bodies in motion and at rest.

"Occasionally a book enters one's life at a particularly apt moment. Thomas Lynch's book of essays arrived fortuitously on the day before my father died, and I carried it with me throughout the dark days that followed. I found his essays deeply consoling. To say they are wise and beautiful would be to understate the matter. Lynch brings a vast accumulation of life-and-death wisdom to the table, and he makes connections between art and mortality that reverberate in the mind. Few readers will walk away from this volume less than stunned and grateful."—Jay Parini

"The eloquence of these studies, the ingenuity of these meditations, and the wit of these terminations (surely the right word here) afford Lynch his continuity with Sir Thomas Browne and with Donne's Biathanathos: his plot, as is said in the trade, is neat, and his mortality remains."—Richard Howard