Literature, like art, pushes against time's fancy - makes us insomniacs in the halls of habit, offers to rescue the life of things from the dead. A story is told about the artist Oskar Kokoschka, who was leading a live drawing class. The students were bored and doing dull work, so Kokoschka whispered to the model and told him to collapse to the ground. Kokoschka went over to the prone body, listened to his heart, pronounced him dead. The class was deeply shocked. Then the model stood up, and Kokoschka said: 'Now draw him as though you were aware he was alive and not dead!' What might that painting, in fiction, of a live body look like? It would paint a body that was truly alive, but in such a way that we might be able to see that a body is always really dying; it would understand that life is shadowed by mortality, and thus make a death-seeing metaphysics of Kokoschka's life-giving aesthetics. (Isn't this what makes serious noticing truly serious?) It might read like this passage from a late story by Saul Bellow, 'Something to Remember Me By'. It is a paragraph about a drunken Irishman, McKern, who has passed out on a couch: 'I looked in at McKern, who had thrown down the coat and taken off his drawers. The parboiled face, the short nose pointed sharply, the life signs in the throat, the broken look of his neck, the black hair of his belly, the short cylinder between his legs ending in a spiral of loose skin, the white shine of the shins, the tragic expression of his feet.' This is perhaps what Kokoschka had in mind: Bellow is painting, in words, a model, who might or might not be alive: a painting that threatens at any moment to become a still life. [...]