Census by Jesse Ball   {Reviewed by THOMAS} “It isn’t terrible to die. It is simply terrible to be observed, and therefore to be somehow in hopeless peril. There is no distance a fish can go that will save it. From the moment at which it is observed, the fish is permitted a sort of grace that will be concluded with the bayonet of the cormorant’s beak.” Following a terminal diagnosis for his illness, a doctor who has been caring for his Down Syndrome son alone since his wife’s death takes a position as a census taker and sets off with his son to collect data from places increasingly distant from the circle on the map that contains the fully known zone of their lives. In what kind of world will he leave his son? What would the world be like without the presence of the one who wonders what the world would be like without him? As the census taker and his son travel through the various zones, from A towards Z, they visit the homes of a number of people (the census does not aspire to being exhaustive) and, without the presupposition of any types of answers, the census taker rigorously observes the particularities of the people they meet (the census does not presume either from or to generalities), carefully noting their stories without imposing himself in any way other than as catalyst-observer, enabling the respondent to look within and to reveal something unguarded, something often at once indicative both of damage and of what for want of a better word we could call goodness (the census is alert not so much to the ways in which people are harmed by the society of which they are a part but rather to the ways in which they display kindness despite these harms). The rigour of the census taker is a relinquishment of his participation in the world, the rigour of anyone who is going to die (all of us, in other words) and who wishes to see what kind of world they are both completely immersed in and leaving. “We as humans are so full of longing, what is blank eludes us. A census taker must above all attempt, even long for, blankness.” Through the practice of the census the census taker is perhaps also learning to see the world in a way similar to that of his son, who he regards as unburdened with a sense of self, and who appears to conceive of life spatially rather than temporally. It is the purpose of the census to lead us to perceive the world with immediacy and without projecting expectations or presuppositions upon it. “The wondrousness of experience resides in the discrimination, not in the name. So I would be speaking for a world without names - wherein we see what is, and are impressed by it - the impressions push into us and change us forever. This is the world I believe my son lives in.” The love of the father for his son is depicted with immense tenderness (Ball wrote the book for his brother Abram, who had Down Syndrome and died at age 24), and the account of their travels together towards Z, where the dying father will complete his withdrawal from existence and the son will take a train back towards the world at which this journey, this relinquishment, began, is deeply beautiful and sad. The prose achieves a peculiar intensity and a particularity of cadence that leaves a lasting impression upon the reader. “You are travelling towards your death. You have always been a census taker. But now your efforts are joined in the community of work.”