At my recent interview for admission into a palliative-care doula-training program, the director asked a simple question. “There are so many ways to volunteer in your community. Why this way?” I froze at volunteer. “Oh!” I said crazily, “I don’t really volunteer. I just want to be there when it happens.”

What draws me to the end of life? The answer can be found in one line from Freud’s 1917 “Mourning and Melancholia.” Turning from the processes of mourning to the symptomatically similar but psychically distinct processes of melancholia, Freud remarks on cases when the object of love has been lost, but the patient “cannot consciously perceive” it. Sometimes, even when the melancholic understands what has happened, Freud writes, “he knows whom he has lost but not what he has lost in him.”

What do we lose when we ourselves are on the precipice, and how do we meet the end of a life entangled with a particular voice, book, or work of art? I’m training as a death doula because I’ve been thinking about these questions as they pertain to Jane Austen, the master stylist of English fiction whose enthusiasts re-read her novels as a near-religious practice. As a scholar, teacher, and, of course, Janeite myself, I recognize the call of fellow acolytes like E.M. Forster’s confession a century ago, “I am a Jane Austenite, and, therefore, slightly imbecile about Jane Austen,” and the writer Rachel Cohen’s recent book about the “condition” during which “Jane Austen became my only author.” I have been thinking about the end of life as an end of literature, not just a withdrawal from reading but from living in language—more precisely, Her language.

My theory: just as the Janeite has lived a better life, they will die a better death—perhaps not free from existential distress but more equipped to meet it. “The Janeite,” the scholar Deidre Lynch writes, “holds the secret of the literary.” A People of the Book, their lifelong practice of immersion and release, repetitively reading their sacred texts, does not abandon them even when language begins to. What does their devotional exercise entail and how would it help them at the end?

Most exposure to Austen now takes place through TV and film adaptations whose dewy actors and outsized Regency textiles supply the kind of detailed physicality and explicit consummation that are precisely omitted by the novelist’s prose. As in “Exactly at the time when it was quite natural that it should be so, and not a week earlier, Edmund did cease to care about Miss Crawford, and became as anxious to marry Fanny as Fanny herself could desire” (Mansfield Park) and “Henry and Catherine were married, the bells rang, and everybody smiled” (Northanger Abbey). For literary critics, it is this je ne sais quoi of Austen’s narration that remains eternally mysterious.

“It is common to speak of Jane Austen's novels as a miracle,” Cambridge critic Q.D. Leavis dryly opened her “Critical Theory of Jane Austen’s Writing” in 1941. Seven years later, Q.D.’s husband, F.R. Leavis, held Austen to be the beacon of the English novel. “She not only makes tradition for those coming after, but her achievement has for us a retroactive effect,” he wrote in The Great Tradition, a study that institutionalized British fiction. “Her work, like the work of all great creative writers, gives a meaning to the past.” So, too, in Ian Watt’s critically enduring story about “the rise of the novel,” the genre rises to Austen, with eighteenth-century predecessors looking ahead and Victorian successors looking back at her triumph.

When we are talking about Jane Austen, we are talking not about courtship plots or manners or compulsory heterosexuality but about the perfectibility of the novel form. The cultural pairing of “Will & Jane,” reinforces Austen’s supremacy, held with Shakespeare alone, in composing from the English language. With the proliferation of rom-com remakes, it may be surprising to remember that Janeites (coined by George Saintsbury in 1894) have historically been a brotherhood of the powerful (Winston Churchill, Alfred Tennyson) who claimed possessive knowledge of this exquisite language. Even today, Janeites encompass a wider set of thinkers (Cornel West, Ta-Nehisi Coates) than some may expect.

*

On a Saturday in March, I participated in the annual fête for nerds, Brooklyn Public Library’s Night in the Library, a program of talks and performances that rages until early morning. At 9:30 pm from a podium in the vast Language and Literature room on the first floor, I instructed the mass of revelers to put on their monocles and prepare to party like it’s 1799. “Your only task at this moment is to Check. Each. Other. Out,” bellowed my improbable DJ alter ego. “So, is there someone you’d like to be introduced to? Keep looking. Did you spot someone with a pleasing countenance? Perhaps, an intelligent and lively eye? Someone you can just tell is very agreeable. Someone who could talk to you all night with fluency and spirit, even if you can hardly understand what they’re saying. Keep looking.” The Janeites in the room, of course, readily transformed into Northanger Abbey’s Catherine Morland, adrift in the Lower Rooms of Bath, introduced to “a very gentleman-like young man as a [dance] partner,” the enchantingly arch and “if not quite handsome, [then] very near it” Henry Tilney. But even those in the audience who did not recognize the charged and precise language could sense the festive patterning of their attention, the shaping of their perceptions as they took in their fellow partygoers.

Celebrations are taking place this year all around the Anglophone world to mark Jane Austen’s birthday, or as exemplary Janeite Reginald Farrer wrote at the end of World War I, an occasion to “celebrate the hundredth”—now 250th—“year of her immortality.” Of Farrer’s ultimate proposition, Claudia Johnson observes in Jane Austen: Cults and Cultures, “the DNA of Austen via the textuality of her novels becomes absorbed into our own bodies.” Analyzing Kipling’s 1924 story, “The Janeites,” about a secret military society whose members band together through minute knowledge of Austen’s novels, Johnson argues that Janeites exemplify “a way to be in an absurd and doomed world beyond their control” and so to “piece together a shattering world.” Certain works of art hold strangers together—an alternative, temporary commonwealth. At The Night in the Library, lines for entry wrapped around Grand Army Plaza. Registration had to be closed. “It hasn’t been like this since Trump’s first election,” remarked an organizer. 

That night, I concluded my presentation with the same PowerPoint slide with which I now end all of my public lectures:

NYU Prof. Wendy Anne Lee is looking for once-avid readers of literature (especially novels, especially Jane Austen) who experience dementia to participate in new research. Please contact her at wl45@nyu.edu if you know of potential subjects.

So far, a few responses have trickled in, including self-volunteers. Some friends have offered up their mothers or mothers-in-law, although they are nervous about categorizing them as dementing (the state of cognitive unfastening that occupies me). I am interested in all cases and follow up. But no one fits the bill exactly. Here is the one I am seeking:

YOU, dementing Janeite, have been reading Austen’s novels for a long time, maybe since childhood or adolescence, possibly every year. Possibly you have little sustained interest in other authors. Your inner bumper sticker says, “I’d rather be reading Jane Austen.” For, pretty much, you would always prefer to be reading Austen, even in snatches. Picking up one of her six finished novels of prose perfection and flipping to any page, any passage, at any moment lifts you into realms of absorption, delight, and psychological reassurance. Moreover, they stay with you, these six spheres, spinning continuously in your mind and memory. You know these compositions so well because you play them regularly, even annually, in rotation. Their worlds have been long fused with your world—your perceptions, judgments, your very identity. Elinor Dashwood, Anne Elliot, Mr. Knightley, even Fanny Price—c’est toi.

YOU, my rarefied subject, instinctively grasp what Ruth Wilson does when she calls Austen’s novels “a starting point for exploring the satisfactions and dissatisfactions of my own life, framed and illuminated by her fictional universe.” Wilson’s The Jane Austen Remedy (2022)—“an empowering memoir of a life reclaimed through reading”—is a kind of compensation or reclamation at the age of almost 90. But it is not clear to you what life would ever have been without continuous immersion in Austen’s language.

Oh! The other thing about YOU, my coveted object, is that you are dying. This is important. The end of embodied consciousness is coming fast, and you know it. I am catching you right on the threshold of nonbeing. You will shortly have to let go of all of it, including Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Mansfield Park, Emma, Northanger Abbey, and Persuasion, where Austen thumbnails your condition: “All which this world could do for [you]” has been done.

Palliative care nurse Sallie Tisdale captures your state in her book Advice for Future Corpses (and Those Who Love Them), describing the chaos of this transition: “Consciousness is no longer grounded in the body; perception and sensation are unraveling. The entire braid of the self is coming unwound in a rush.” If you are experiencing what researchers call “existential distress,” or “psychological turmoil in the face of imminent death,” the end does not come as easily as perhaps it should. But I think it will for you, dear Janeite.

*

In 2015, the vegan activist Carol J. Adams, author of The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory, was invited to the University of Chicago to give a talk. In connection, the journal Critical Inquiry solicited an article from Adams, who responded that she had not been able to work on her own monograph for many years because she was consumed with tending to her elderly parents and mother-in-law.

What she had were diary entries that mostly documented the mind-numbing relentlessness, isolation, and existential burnout of care work. Over those years, she filled 120 notebooks. In 2017, a piece built around selected entries was published by Critical Inquiry. Those entries highlight the fact that during that period she began “to read and reread Jane Austen’s novels…

Not so much pray to be relieved from this obsession over P[ride] & P[rejudice] but that it might reveal itself to me. Thinking about [Thomas] Merton giving up novels. How could he do that?
What a loss—
to lose Jane Austen’s vision. 

At an eye exam, you are seated in a mechanical chair adjusted so that you can lean your forehead against the cool metal face of a stereoscopic viewfinder (phoropter) whose calibrated dials and cylinders are adjusted as you peer at diminishing lines of text:

E P N O Z 

Each eye is tested, one at a time.

Click.
“Which is clearer: one or two?”
Click.
“Which is clearer: two or three?”
Click.

Sometimes the new lens makes things blurry, even painful to look through. Then, another disk drops in, like a fresh quarter in a coin slot, and all is once more water-clear. At some point, you know this is as perfect as sight can be, that through this exact curve of glass you can discern the precise heads and tails of every letter, every symbolic string.

The world as language—all of its contours, lucid and distinct. When you read by aligning your vision with divine perspective, you understand that such a point of view was always available to you, is yours again now. Tuning to perfect pitch.

Scholar and writer Nicholas Dames asks, “Do we need Austen to flee modernity or to see it clearly? Why would we need to do either?” To endure. To end it.

Existential distress is the disquietude of unfinished business. This cannot be the end because something still worries you, will not let you leave in peace. Because in your state of mind you are unable to identify who or what is agitating you, general turbulence overtakes your consciousness. You remain in turmoil, unable to free yourself from this darkening world. “Manifestations,” the aforementioned researchers report, “may include demoralization syndrome, death anxiety, profound loneliness, regret, and commonly, the desire for hastened death”—precisely what this gnawing and inchoate distress denies you.

What could bring you to a clinical state of “existential well-being” and so to a more peaceful end of life? Apart from pharmacological ministrations, some “meaning-making intervention” in the form of music or painting or even <gasp> “narrative medicine” could be given to you, researchers advise. Whatever it takes, you need help achieving “relationship completion,” the resolution or surrender of social, emotional, and spiritual affairs that can, and often do, resurface when dying.

*

It is unlikely that you have been reading much. Language has slipped away. For days, maybe weeks, you speak little, if at all, and you do not really follow when others are talking. Visitors, nurses, and chaplains sit by your bed and gently ask if you recognize them, if you remember this person or that incident. You used to pretend to take an interest, but now their presence recedes from your attention.

Before you withdraw entirely, some still discernible voice breaks through: What was all that? What am I supposed to let go of?

Where clinical research suggests that music therapy can assist the psychic processes of dying, YouTube offers demonstration. Just search online for the discredited yet nonetheless compelling video titled “Former Ballerina With Alzheimer's Performs 'Swan Lake' Dance | Super Emotional.” You don’t have to be a dancer to experience the impact. Hymns or childhood songs, any Super Emotionally meaningful piece of music, reaches through even late-stage dementia. Providing a visceral, sensory experience at the end of life seems counter-intuitive. How is it that intensity—not tranquility—best meets existential distress? Intensity not as verbal reassurance, therapeutic touch or some other form of interpersonal contact, but as the reactivation of deep feeling through music? Notably, this acute responsiveness aroused by music is not to your friends, family or pets, but to your own “inner capabilities,” what could be cast in Spinozan terms as the body’s power of acting and the mind’s power of understanding. Even wasted in a wheelchair, even with a brain clotted with amyloid plaques and neurofibrillary tangles, you still undulate your mighty wings, still distinguish the shifts in Tchaikovsky’s crashing score.

Compositions are precise holding structures of consciousness for specific intervals of time. In my arts collaboration, Consent Lab at NYU—founded in 2022 by musicologist Brigid Cohen, theater artist Rosemary Quinn, designer/choreographer Mimi Yin, and myself—we compose and study experimental interaction, through situations that have participants moving between outer and inner realities. If this sounds abstract, it both is and isn’t. Staying aware of what’s coming up on the inside (memories, associations, emotions) as you register what’s coming at you from the outside (an overwhelm of bodies, forces) is a discipline that requires practice. The composer Pauline Oliveros describes it as a constant harmonization between awareness and attention.

In one extended exercise called “Elizabeth Bennet at the Piano,” designed by Mimi, participants read and physicalize the micro-scene from Pride and Prejudice (vol. II, ch. 8) when Mr. Darcy makes a beeline for Elizabeth Bennet in the drawing room at Rosings. We read the passage slowly and methodically, letting certain details simmer, like how Darcy “stationed himself so as to command a full view of the fair performer’s countenance,” and we break down the dialogue (“I am not afraid of you”) to render with our bodies, line by line, the dynamics between Darcy and Elizabeth. The exercise typifies the Lab’s combined mode of embodiment and abstraction. You are moving through a highly specific and yet deeply ambiguous structure. This is Austen’s signature: precise language, open signification. “What did she say?—Just what she ought, of course. A lady always does.” Unlike, say, Tolstoy’s maximalist material descriptions (as in Anna Karenina: “‘How wonderfully they make this soap,’ he said gazing at a piece of soap he was handling, which Agafea Mihalovna had put ready for the visitor but Oblonsky had not used.”), Austen gives us just enough detail for cathexis, but leaves considerable blank space to keep imagining as we like and anew: “Emma felt her foot pressed by Mrs. Weston, and did not herself know what to think.” Gesture, wonder. 

*

If consent is a dance, language is the score. Austen’s prose is commonly likened to music, especially Mozart’s. The Janeite, like a practiced musician with a fixed repertory, retains a compositional imprinting. To re-read is to play the piece with new potential for interpretive variation or return. Thus, the Janeite can also appreciate (or hate on) others’ interpretations. Each Janeite has a proprietary relation to Austen’s novels, akin to Barthes’ writerly (scriptible) texts that activate a fantasy of shared creation. I know and love these sentences so well that I must have—or may as well have—written them, too (with, or even as, Austen). Close reading blurs into “close writing,” an activity and way of life that sustains “my longing to write in this language, to identify and combine with it,” confesses D.A. Miller in his treatise, Jane Austen, or The Secret of Style.

In the history of devotional reading, Christopher Cannon describes how Medieval readers returned to the same Biblical passages to encourage illumination. Prayerful, repetitive reading involves this perpetual meeting through intimate language, a drawing together of points along a silk string of words: “Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her.” Like Saint Augustine who communes not with the voice of God but with “his own language,” the Janeite, too, “finds [their] language” in Austen’s divine phrasing.

Both novels and musical compositions may be temporal forms, but novels are better vehicles for stopping and starting, whereas pieces of music or dance are best experienced continuously. Even if you learn the whole by breaking it up in segments, playing or listening essentially involves being present to its unspooling through time. It is an experience of what Henri Bergson describes in his Introduction to Metaphysics as pure duration, the unitary flow or unbroken movement of living reality. Novel-reading, by contrast, does not proceed continuously. Even in the days when novels were mainly read aloud, there would be plenty of breaks and pauses. Novels are forms for moving in and out of your thoughts as you take in sentences and scenes in your own recursive, meandering, spaced-out and particular-to-you way. For the Janeite, whose consciousness travels through Austen’s words, the intervals of not reading become strangely integrated into the flow of re-reading. This is the “delicious consciousness” (Persuasion) of the Janeite, for whom the activities of reading, living, and thinking are so enmeshed. Austen’s novels make a music of consciousness.

Six books are just about what you can hold in your head if you read them in fairly consistent rotation. A discrete system bounded by the bright star of Austen’s intelligence, it is an oeuvre dense enough to capture (detail) and porous enough to escape (concept). We could liken the six texts to a running polyphony if, instead of playing through time, the music could be pulled through a multiverse, through other possible dimensions. Existence comes to have this uncanny stretch for the Janeite. And this is because within each novel, Austen’s unerring narration, just on the line between description and abstraction, allows for the fluid shuttling between internal and external perception that is akin to the experience of leaving this world. You can call it free indirect style if it’s killing you. Bergson, of the earlier mentioned Metaphysics, calls it the distinction between intuition and analysis. Novel-reading especially, he writes, enables intuition as “the kind of intellectual sympathy by which one places oneself within an object in order to coincide with what is unique in it and consequently inexpressible.” While science concerns itself with analysis, or knowing from the outside, as compared with other objects. Both modes are at work in Austen’s fiction.

*

Practice on the subway. Look at the passenger directly opposite you. Take in every physical detail that you can: furry beige boots, the shape of the stain on their Carhartts, frayed cuticles and chipped nail polish. It’s a partial, sequential process. Now try to inhabit that person. It might take mirroring the position of their legs or tilting your head at the same angle as theirs and then maybe closing your eyes. Janeites have been practicing this kind of fluctuating quick-change for so long that it’s second nature—immersion in and release from objects—relationship completion à la existential distress, time and again.

This is the Janeite’s celestial music, an eternal dance of bodies and souls that fuse and disperse, unite and separate. Could it actually end? When the final silence washes over me, would I still hear it or would I be ready to let it go, having known it so well for so long? The end of thought and motion, of coming closer and pulling away. There can be no music for non-existence, no matter what they say.

In late-stage cognition, it becomes harder to distinguish between internal and external phenomena. If something causes me pain or relief, it does not matter whether or not it physically exists or can be ascertained by others. Objects are being derealized as I move inward (what clinicians call “nearing death awareness”), and I feel at home as the boundary disintegrates (Who are you? Where is this place? What is happening to me?). I close my eyes, I remember. I open my eyes, I forget.

He talked with fluency and spirit—and there was an archness and pleasantry in his manner which interested, though it was hardly understood by

Anne heard nothing distinctly; it was only a buzz of words in her ear, her mind was in confusion. She began not to understand a word they

But tell me all about it! Talk to me for

Oh! I am delighted with the book! I should like to spend my whole life in reading ♦