December 7–14, 2000

Rot Around the Clock

A Dutch biologist surveys our fascination with the way things fall apart.

by Justin Bauer

The Way of All Flesh: The Romance of Ruins

By Midas Dekkers
Farrar, Strauss & Giroux,
280 p., $25

Midas Dekkers seems to share the gift of his fabled namesake — to a degree. Everything he touches turns to shit.

Or rot. Or dust. To be more precise, the Dutch biologist’s new book, The Way of All Flesh: The Romance of Ruins, attempts to compass a full sphere of natural and cultural processes, from cellular division to a wristwatch’s planned obsolescence, and each topic it touches on repeats a story of decay.

Dekkers’ basic premise boils down to the oldest of truisms: Nothing is as good as it used to be. The Way of All Flesh endeavors, by way of a wide-ranging and very detailed inquiry, to prove this axiom. In other words, it tries to explain the reasons for constant decay. While the simplest answer, the most basic process governing steady decline, lies in the entropy posited by the Second Law of Thermodynamics, Dekkers’ task pushes him outside the narrow confines of abstract physical laws. He ranges on to genetics and meteorology, cultural history and aesthetics. Even if thermodynamics sets the clock ticking, it fails to describe the larger and more complex processes of atavism and aging, or account for the fascination of ruin and decay.

It’s precisely this range that makes Dekkers’ study both interesting and frustrating. After all, it’s difficult to expect the general reader to maintain any level of interest in the laws of thermodynamics for more than a few paragraphs — one of the chief reasons God gave us Stephen Hawking, perhaps — and Dekkers shows he understands this quite well. His method, essayistic and resolutely unscientific, consists of knotting together different explanations of delight in decay; the parallels he suggests between, say, an adolescent sex drive and historical landscape gardening provoke much more interest than the proceedings of learned science.

Dekkers stands on the most solid ground when he sticks close to what he knows — the description and clarification of biological matters. He has a clear style and an easy manner; his writing brings to mind the science professor you wish you had had as an undergraduate, alternating lucid detail with lighthearted asides. Though Dekkers’ jokes mostly fall flat, they’re easy to imagine lightening up the dusty atmosphere of a lecture hall. And while much of the scientific information in The Way of All Flesh is rendered in sufficient complexity, Dekkers does an admirable job of relaying his evidence in layman’s terms. He strikes the fine balance between watering down serious intellectual work and retaining interesting and accessible facts.

When he steps outside the bounds of scientific inquiry, though, the acuity of his perception lessens. The thoroughness of his biological writing makes a sharp contrast to his ideas of history, art and aesthetics. In fact, the first two chapters of the book, where Dekkers states his case in the broadest of terms and considers both the modern denial of aging and the artistic, Romantic fascination with dissolution and ruin, show a scholarship that is at best incomplete. Even as a partial intellectual history, his account of Gothic fixations on madness, perversion and ruins omits information the average art-history student could supply, and presents a picture that is more suggestive than comprehensive.

As The Way of All Flesh progresses, however, and as Dekkers’ sure scientific explanation progressively dominates other speculations, the book increasingly fascinates. The processes of decomposition and decay, exhibited in squeamish detail (and accompanied by one or two completely stomach-turning photos) mark out both a general cultural criticism of our attitudes toward aging and death, and an intensely personal response to the demands of an aging body. At the same time, Dekkers charges late-twentieth century society with an unhealthy denial of aging, while the author himself, revealed progressively over the course of his book, exposes his own neuroses and fears and uncovers the foundation of midlife crisis grounding his study.

In the end, for all of its gross fascination, his examination can only give the cold comfort of a scientist’s answer. No, nothing really is as good as it used to be. And it won’t get any better.