The Letter from Death - Softcover

Lillian Moats

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0966957636 ISBN 13: 9780966957631

Publisher: Three Arts Press, 2009

Synopsis

Lillian Moats' latest book, The Letter from Death, features a foreword by Howard Zinn and 20 evocative full-page illustrations by David Moats. This slim volume casts a bright light on how our unexamined fear of death has, throughout history, misdirected our energies--away from the real and immediate challenges of this world and toward unnecessary war, injustice and self-destruction. Death's philosophical essay, addressed to the whole of humanity, is as poignant as it is polemical. The Letter from Death is both stylistically daring and politically charged, and will challenge even the most open-minded readers to re-examine the basis of their beliefs about death, life and ''human nature.''

About this title

About the Author:

Lillian Moats is a writer, artist and filmmaker living near Chicago. She earned a bachelor of fine arts degree from the University of Michigan and a Masters degree in education from the University of Wisconsin. She has won over 40 international film festival awards (including 6 Cine Gold Eagles) for the animated art films she has produced with her filmmaking partner, JP Somersaulter. The Letter from Death is the last of four books (The Gate of Dreams, Legacy of Shadows, Speak, Hands by the author.

Review:

"I devoured this book. Lillian Moats brilliantly makes Death the narrator of a tour through hell and war, which are both rooted in fear itself. We hear of the litany of hells that religion has invented to scare us into blind obedience. Filled with punch lines that make you laugh and cry, The Letter from Death shows the hell of war that in the end is as horrible as the medieval worms and fire of the Christian church s imagined afterlife. But by the end of the book we see Death as the empathetic curator of humanity s most precious yearnings for life, while the warmongers among us turn out to be the real Grim Reapers of death. Read this book and you will look at death and life in a newly liberated way. David Moats illustrations, sometimes chilling, always provocative, make the imagination glow." --Michael McConnell, Regional Director, American Friends Service Committee

"The Letter from Death is cogent, profound, relevant, and needed. Moats deserves thanks and congratulations for confronting the subject of Death head on eloquently realistically, and rationally and for her remarkable combination of pessimism and optimism. Her readers will be challenged, and the thinking of some, changed." --Kathleen E. McCrone, Professor Emeritus of History, University of Windsor

The Letter from Death is exquisite acutely imagined, well-crafted, vivid, simultaneously transcendent and focused. Who better than Death to explain the addiction of the death culture? Who better able to document the horror? What a book! It deserves a large, large audience. --William Ayers, Distinguished Professor of Education, University of Illinois at Chicago

Novels-in-letters, or essays in letter form, are direct, intimate, and powerful. When the correspondent serves as mentor, literary letters also become the perfect vehicles for observations, teachings, and inspiration.

Chicago-area artist, filmmaker, and writer Lillian Moats has used the novel-in-letter form to astonishing effect in her new book, The Letter from Death, a philosophical and profoundly illuminating book not unlike C. S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters in its purposefully topsy-turvy approach. In Moats’ book, Death is not the terrifying, malevolent force you might expect, but rather a wise, all-seeing entity trying to awaken us to the errors of our violent ways. The spiritual resonance of The Letter from Death aligns it with Rilke’s cherished Letters to a Young Poet, while the expansive perspective Moats achieves, and her passionate call for reason and peace are akin to The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth, in which the famed biologist Edward. O. Wilson addresses letters to “Dear Pastor” in a quest to unite religion and science in order to save nature. Wilson is commonsensical and ardent, as is Lillian Moats. But Moats is also mischievous as she makes a phenomenal leap of the imagination and writes from Death’s point of view.

Here’s the opening page in this handsomely designed book, which is boldly illustrated by David Moats, Lillian’s son:

“To Those It May Concern,

That should leave none of you out. Or should I say, “To Those I May Concern”? A puny word––“concern”––for your terror of me. You can’t imagine the ironies I find in your hatred of me––your hatred of me as the “enemy of life” (which may be the only idea you have ever united around). Am I the enemy of life? No. I am passive. You are the enemies of life! How many of your own kind have you killed over these millennia? Murder, neglect––your beloved wars. And you call me the “Grim Reaper.” What do you know of me?  Nothing!”

What do we learn of Death? That Death is scornful of all the “vile gods, goddesses, angels, and lords” humankind has envisioned as embodying Death. Death has had it with our blaming him, her, or it for our grotesque visions of hell, our horrific habit of war. Death writes, “You tried to pass off your perversity as mine. Why have you tormented yourselves––why have you insulted me––with such fantasies?”

Moats not only has Death decry the brutality and senselessness of war, she also envisions Death as a cosmic being who has always been with us, keeping close watch, assimilating our feelings, and evolving right along with us as we create more catastrophic weapons and escalate the reach and consequences of war. Death says frankly, “It is the resulting destructiveness of your species that I find most abhorrent.” How strange and bracing it is to have Death castigating us for our growing militarism, and our enslavement to fear. ...

Lillian Moats portrays Death as enraged and righteously indignant. Tender and despairing. Death rejects as simplistic the terms “good” and “evil,” and notes that we’re capable of both, depending on the circumstances. ...

Moats’ conception of Death as a caring and wise entity is provocative, even shocking, and utterly convincing because her finely realized vision is firmly rooted in extensive research into religious and military history, as evident in the bibliography she generously includes. Lillian Moats’ The Letter from Death is a unique and resounding monologue, a brilliant distillation, a portal into our collective soul. A poetic manifesto. A courageous and beautiful book. -- Donna Seaman, for “Eight-Forty-Eight” on Chicago Public Radio

About this edition

• Publisher: Three Arts Press
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 0966957636
• ISBN 13: 9780966957631
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 141
• Illustrator: David Moats