From The Undying, which will be published this month by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
There is no more tragic piece of furniture than a bed, how it falls so quickly from the place we make love to the place we might die in. It is tragic, too, for how it falls so quickly from the place where we sleep to the place where we think ourselves mad. The bed where anyone makes love is also—too clearly for anyone stuck there because of illness—the grave, as John Donne described it, from which they might never rise.
In 1621, an anonymous Flemish…