Biography

Close your eyes.  In the variable darkness, the extent to which you rely on sight for your sense of the world might come into focus.  You can open your eyes now; if you really did close them.

II.

Chuck Krantz will soon no longer be able to open his eyes, or close them, for that matter.  "The seeds of his end ... are planted deep, where no surgeon's knife will ever go ... they will bear black fruit." <1>  Krantz has cancer and will be dead in a matter of months, at the age of thirty-nine.  The glioblastoma will have him "enter a land of pain so great that he will wonder why God made the world."

In his youth, Chuck had a question for his sixth grade teacher about Whitman's "Song of Myself".  Miss Richards replied that the line about containing multitudes was Whitman expressing that a person could have the entire world inside them.  Chuck himself will be questioned one day by a college girlfriend, about how he is necessarily significant outside of his own imagination.  "She was a poet and sort of a nihilist."

Charles Krantz goes on to become an accountant.  He is taking a walk in Boston one day when he comes across a busker playing the drums.  The drumming brings back Chuck's memories of having been a singer in a rock band during high school.  At performances with the band, Chuck "really liked ... the instrumental breaks, because then he could dance and strut his way across the stage like Jagger".  Will Chuck now, encouraged by the drummer's rhythm, break into dance right there on the street?

III.

Stephen King's "The Life of Chuck" is an eerie novella, that which explores well-being along with the apocalyptic.  Dance while you can, before your life, as the world, ends.

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<1>King, Stephen. "The Life of Chuck". If It Bleeds (2022). Pocket Books Edition.