God bless you, Dr. Kevorkian (30 page)

Asimov, who died of kidney and heart failure, age seventy-two, eight years ago. When on Earth, Isaac, my predecessor as honorary president of the American Humanist Association, was the most prolific American writer of books who ever lived. He

nearly five hundred of the

my measly twenty so far, or to

de Balzac's

eighty-five. Sometimes Isaac wrote ten published volumes in a single year! These weren't only science-fiction. Many were scholarly popularizations of Shakespeare and biochemistry and ancient Greek histo and the Bible and relativity, and on and on. Isaac has a Ph.D. in chemistry from Columbia, and was born in Smolensk, in the former Soviet Union, but was raised in Brooklyn. He hated flying, and never read Hemingway or Fitzgerald or Joyce or Kafka, according to his obituary in the

Times.
"I am a

stranger," he once wrote, "to twentieth-century fiction and poetry."

76

"Isaac," I said, "you should be in the
Guinness Book of
Records."

And he said, "To be immortalized along with a rooster named

who weighed twenty-two

pounds and killed two cats?"

I asked him if he was still writing, and he said, "All the time! If I couldn't write all the time, this would be hell for me. Earth would have been a hell for me if I couldn't write all the time. Hell itself would be bearable for me, as long as I could write all the time."

"Thank goodness there is no Hell," I

'

"Enjoyed talking to you," he said, "but I have to get back to work

a six-volume set about cockamamie

beliefs in an Afterlife."

"I myself would cheerfully settle for sleep," I said.

"Spoken as a true humanist," he said, becoming more antsy by the second.

"One last question," I begged. "To what do you attribute your incredible productivity?" 77

Isaac Asimov replied with but a single word:

"Escape." And then he appended a famous statement by the similarly prolific French writer Jean-Paul Sartre:

"Hell is other people."