Imagining What You Think Is the Unimaginable

The Rumpus conducted this interview with (the tremendous) Aleksander Hemon prior to the events in Boston, but, as the interview touches on his own experience of “unimaginable” loss (a child, to cancer), it really resonates today.

Hemon: This is a culture that continuously, consistently refuses to deal with the fact of death, on so many levels. From zombie and vampire movies, to the insane amount of death you can see at any moment on television or in the movie theaters, which makes it unreal, to the steady supply and pool of dreadful clichés when people talk about death. When the children in [Newtown] were killed and Obama said, “God called them home,” I wanted to break something.

But that’s not really for the parents or the children. It’s for the rest of us who do not want to think about it; the cliché activates the comfortable mental laziness, we sort of revert to the domain of the already-familiar, what we have already imagined so that it doesn’t seem that bad, and then slowly it slides out of view and then we think, Well, we will live forever.

Hemon’s first work of nonfiction, “The Book of My Lives” (Indiebound | Amazon) is available now.