Living, Loving, and Other Heresies

Zsolt, a gifted writer, musician, dancer, and teacher, has been living with a progressive neuropathy since 1998. In 1999, unable to keep up with all of his correspondence, he began a group e-mail list to which he sent out regular essays about how the disease was affecting his life. As the illness progressed and he lost the ability to walk, to speak, and even to take care of himself, he nevertheless was able to continue writing by using a word-recognition keyboard program. As a result he has been able to chronicle and contemplate the disease's effect from a realm which has mostly remained beyond words until the advent of contemporary communications technology. At the same time, as its title suggests, Living, Loving, and Other Heresies goes far beyond coping with degenerative disease. Zsolt's essays and poems range across a passionate and deeply examined life in which his debilitating illness has played but one part. Although over the last few years the disease has relentlessly forced him to withdraw from the world, in his writing Zsolt nevertheless continues to embrace that world in the exuberant tradition of Whitman. By turns tender and passionate, playful and indignant, humorous and committed, Zsolt affirms the beauty of life and transforming power of love while simultaneously confronting his own stark fate.