I had just finished—for the fourth or fifth time—Ernest Becker’s psychoanalytic Denial of Death when news came that the Coyote Culture was doing an illness theme. In other years I would have written about trying to grade papers with a nose running like a faucet, or the sore throat that comes with the first week of standing at the blackboard explaining apostrophe rules. But Becker is more concerned with the hazards of The Fall than of Fall Semester. He does claim humans—all humans—are ill. He says they’re batshit crazy.

Becker doesn’t exactly use that phrase. But he suggests that the illness of psychosis might be the only way out for humans witnessing a creation “in which the routine activity is for organisms to be tearing others apart with teeth of all types—biting, grinding flesh, plant stalks, bones between molars, pushing the pulp greedily down the gullet with delight, incorporating its essence into one’s own organization, and then excreting with foul stench and gasses the residue.” Doesn’t exactly make you want to go out and order a Quarter Pounder with Cheese, or even a tofu enchilada, for that matter.

But Denial of Death is a decent book because it’s a serious treatment of what it means to be mortal and puny and irredeemably animal and yet exquisitely aware of the beauty and terror of the cosmos. Becker says that’s the human condition, and he says we run from our awareness by shopping ‘til we drop, or getting face-down-in-the-gutter drunk, or using drugs, or joining a political party, or getting religion, or screwing ourselves silly, or working at a decades-long career, or beating up our spouses, or striving for literary honors, or being military heroes, or enrolling in school for yet one more degree.

All are evasions of the truth of our lives, and Becker treats them all with more or less the same contempt. They are the illusions-unto-psychosis that we spend all our time and energy maintaining. He does suggest that in the heat of artistic creation we can forget ourselves as mortal beings and become as gods—at least until the reviews come in.

I read Denial of Death every few years because it helps to explain the various madnesses of our world. Death is hard to successfully deny, so humans are in constant negotiation with it, usually in ways that shift the burdens of dying onto the humans around them. I read Becker when the rapes began in Bosnia and when the Hutus began killing Tutsis and when the cult in California all took cyanide so they could join the spaceship that was trailing a comet. I read it when Clinton put his—and our—well being in the hands of a woman for whom aging was still a distant abstraction. I was reading it this year because I was sure George Bush was going to get reelected by a country determined to keep death outside its borders.