Maira Kalman

Every day, I speak to my beautiful and brilliant cousin, Orna, who lives in Israel.

In normal times, we talk about which cousin is the bigger idiot, which honey cake recipe to use, which books we're reading, the family stories from Belarus.

The conversations are a beacon for me, and they fill my soul and enter my books.

The other day, Orna brought up a Romanian philosopher named Emil Cioran.

He was a miserable insomniac who drove everyone nuts because of this.

He was relentless in talking about how horrible it was to be alive, and he did this until the age of 85, when he died, which is incredibly ironic.

But I must give him credit.

He does bring up the essential dilemma.

Why are we here?

For what purpose?

But today, I don't really want to dwell on the morose.

Let's talk about other things.

So here's Proust, dead, obviously, or you think he's sleeping, but he's dead, from a series of paintings that I've done called Dead in Bed, which includes Tolstoy and Chekhov, of course.

In normal times, and these are not normal times, these are grim times when the world is awash in war and killing, but in normal times, I have a routine.

In the early morning hours, with a strong cup of coffee, I read the obituaries.

The infusion of coffee and biography

affords me a way to reflect.

And it might seem too soon in the day to start with such a tremendous topic, but it is a jolt to action because it reminds me how fragile and how vulnerable we all are and how quickly our lives can end.

The night is different.

Then I watch an endless stream of murder mysteries, preferably British.