The Moon Before Dusk
At the time of my multiple cancer diagnosis, I had been reading Quicksand: What It Means to Be Human by Henning Mankell. Of all the chapters in the book, the one I returned to most often was the opening chapter, The Car Accident.
On first reading, I wondered when the book was going to draw me in. The chapter seemed almost too simple, too restrained. Yet gradually I realized that the whole book was already there inside those pages, quietly waiting.
Mankell describes a near-fatal accident on an icy road many years before his cancer diagnosis. The chapter is not really about the mechanics of the crash itself. It is about the strange suspension of time that arrives when death suddenly appears beside ordinary life. He notices tiny details with painful clarity: the light, the silence, the cold landscape, the body’s reactions. Everything slows. The world becomes intensely physical.
What gives the chapter its power is Mankell’s refusal of melodrama. He writes calmly, almost sparingly, and because of that restraint the fear becomes stronger. The reader senses how thin the surface of life really is. One moment a man is driving along an ordinary road; the next, existence opens beneath him like ice breaking underfoot. The title Quicksand begins there. Not merely in illness, but in the realization that instability is always beneath us. Human beings build lives around routines and assumptions of control, yet underneath them lies uncertainty. Accidents, illnesses, missed opportunities, sudden meetings — these shape our lives far more than we often admit.
When I received my own diagnosis, I understood that feeling differently. Time altered. Life no longer felt rushed in the way it once had. The ordinary moments I had previously hurried past became weightier, more precious, almost tender.
In earlier years I would travel to fulfil speaking assignments in some of Scotland’s beautiful places — .Oban, the Isle of Bute, Campbeltown, Fort William and Ardrishaig I would arrive, speak, and return home again without really noticing where I had been. But now things seemed slower, clearer, somehow illuminated.
An early walk along the beach. The sound of birdsong drifting through trees. Flowers opening quietly at the edge of a path. Evening light resting beneath the rising moon before darkness settled. Even an ordinary conversation with a stranger could suddenly feel significant.
Cancer changed the scale of things. Stress has to be managed. I no longer desired to share time with the unkind or those of a negative disposition.
Before illness, the future often feels endless, and because it feels endless, we move carelessly through our days. Afterwards, time acquires texture. Moments are no longer simply passed through; they are inhabited. Mankell understood this deeply. Throughout Quicksand he preserves memories almost like archaeological fragments rescued from disappearance: childhood mornings, African roads, theatre rehearsals, old conversations.
Reading him during my illness, I began to recognize something similar in myself. Memory became precious not because the past was perfect, but because mortality sharpened attention. Memory surfaces throughout my writings you will notice. Small things that once seemed insignificant suddenly carried emotional weight. A familiar voice. The smell of sea air. The movement of clouds across evening light. Even last night before sundown, I called my wife to come and observe the moon in the bright blue spring sky.
What struck me most was that Mankell never surrendered entirely to despair. Fear and wonder coexist throughout the book. He writes openly about death, yet he is equally fascinated by humanity’s endurance across thousands of years: cave paintings, ancient burials, objects placed beside the dead. Even the smallest human gesture becomes evidence that people have always tried to leave traces of meaning behind them.
In that sense, Quicksand is not really a book about cancer at all. It is a meditation on what it means to remain human while living under the shadow of mortality. Mankell insists upon curiosity, responsibility, beauty, and memory even while acknowledging fear. There is something close to an ikigai within that outlook: a quiet insistence that meaning is still possible despite suffering.
I think that is why The Car Accident remained with me. The chapter opens a doorway into the entire book:
accident → vulnerability → memory → history → what it means to be human
The movement feels natural, almost inevitable. Vulnerability awakens memory; memory connects us to history; history reminds us that countless others have stood where we stand now.
Stylistically, Mankell writes with extraordinary simplicity. His sentences are clear and spare, like stones placed carefully into a river. There are few decorative flourishes. The philosophy emerges naturally through observation rather than argument. That simplicity creates trust. He never sounds as though he is preaching about mortality; he merely observes what it feels like to live beneath it.
What also stayed with me was how physical his writing is. Ice, darkness, roads, mud, caves, sea depths, quicksand — his reflections are always rooted in matter. Mortality in his work is never abstract. It belongs to landscapes and bodies. It belongs to weather and silence.
Perhaps that is why the book spoke so strongly to me during illness. Cancer also pulls life out of abstraction. Suddenly the body becomes central. Time becomes visible. Even beauty becomes more tangible.
And strangely, alongside fear, there can also come a kind of clarity.
Not happiness exactly, nor peace in any complete sense, but an awareness of life that feels more immediate and more truthful than before. The world slows enough to be seen properly. A beach at dawn. Birds moving through morning air. Trees standing motionless in evening light. The moon appearing silently above darkening roofs.
Things that were always there, but which rushed living prevented us from noticing.
