Demons are slippery, no question about it.  Masters of ambush, they will come sprinting out of nowhere to put the sudden hurt on you.

“Well, look, everybody has their demons.  Everybody I ever met, anyway,” said the skeleton, thoughtfully chewing on a long piece of grass.

“Which, of course, is no comfort whatsoever.  It’s like the thought of your own death, especially when Death is getting close enough for you to smell his fetid breath, it’s no consolation to think: ‘well, everybody else is going to die too.’   That’s the nature of a demon– it’s perfectly calibrated to your personalized fear demographic,” the skeleton smiled.  

“As Alice Walker observed about your buddy Zora Neale Hurston ‘you’re up against a hard game if you have to die to win it.’  That’s the game I was up against, Elie, and dying didn’t feel like much of a victory, I can tell you from experience.”

Well, that’s kind of the bonus question here, isn’t it?  What is the most essential component of a good life?  

“It may sound funny, coming from me, but love is the most essential component of a good life.  That’s the only thing a human truly can’t live without.  A deep connection to at least one other person, an open-hearted attitude to those who come toward you.  Take that away, Elie, and the world is a meaningless and hostile place– and hopeless.  Think of people you have known who are incapable of intimacy– take me for example.  I never trusted anyone, really trusted them.  

“I always told you and your sister that the only person you can depend on is yourself, then I softened that by adding ‘and your family, of course.’  You can always depend on your family, I tried to impress on you, even as I knew that a family can destroy you more cruelly and completely than anything.  I knew that because my family had already completely destroyed me.  

“You know, when I congratulated you on the absence of self-pity in your thesis Me Ne Frego, about how you fucked up your chosen career and were blacklisted for life, I was giving you the biggest compliment I knew how to give.  I don’t know how you’re going to figure out how to succeed at this late stage in your life, how you hope to get this Book of Irv into print with no connections to anybody who knows how to open any of the doors you need to get through, but I also applaud the work itself.   You are lining the demons up, describing them clearly, making them familiar as any other character in the story.  You are giving these demons their merciless humanity, which is no small undertaking.”  

It remains to be seen, how large or small an undertaking it will be.  And you’re right that noting an absence of self-pity is a huge compliment.   The pity of it all is that there is more than enough pity to go around.  The pity of it all could go around the world many times over.  

“You’re singing to the choir director, Elie,” said the skeleton, watching the sky for signs.