'You Want to Be Immortal? Disappear.'

What has disappeared? Ambrose Bierce, Weldon Kees, Jimmy Hoffa. Aristotle’s second book of Politics, three-decker novels, rhupunts. Typewriters, payphones, civility. In his story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” (1940; trans. James E. Irby, 1961), Jorge Luis Borges describes a fanciful world of radically subjective idealism, as premised by Bishop Berkeley. “Things become duplicated in Tlön,” he writes; “they also tend to become effaced and lose their details when they are forgotten. A classic example is the doorway which survived so long as it was visited by a beggar and disappeared at his death.” The Louisiana poet Gail White in “The Fascination of What Disappears” examines our preoccupation with the vanished: “There must be something in us that accounts for this endless fascination with Amelia Earhart, the Titanic, or George Mallory on Everest. Perhaps we still believe that we might find out more about what happened: islanders on a solitary shelf of land, brought up on stories of a…