Robert Dessaix's 2014 memoir is a thought-provoking contemplation on mortality from a man who outwardly spurns spirituality. The back cover blurbs reads as follows:

One Sunday night in Sydney, Robert Dessaix collapses in a gutter in Darlinghurst, and is helped to his hotel by a kind young man wearing a T-shirt that says FUCK YOU. What follows are weeks in hospital, tubes and cannulae puncturing his body, as he recovers from the heart attack threatening daily to kill him.

While lying in the hospital bed, Robert chances upon Philip Larkin’s poem 'Days’. What, he muses, have his days been for? What and who has he loved – and why?

The publisher Penguin Random House describes Dessaix’s 2014 memoir as 'witty, acerbic, insightful musings'. Witty sometimes, acerbic often, insightful… maybe. Dessaix gives hints all over the place that he is searching for meaning, while vigilantly ensuring he will never earn the label ‘new age’, a belief system he despises.

In some ways, while he is experiencing a heightened sense of his own mortality, Dessaix takes us on a tour of other culture's belief systems - Egyptians, Buddhists, Hindus, Christians, indigenous Australians and those 'fatuous' new agers who have essentially designed their own. He writes:

'How outmoded it all seems now, this interest in radical spirituality. Nobody could care less about this sort of thing nowadays when bushwalking or a bit of homeopathy is about as "spiritual" as most people seem to get. The word "spiritual" seems to me to have broken free of any sort of semantic tethering at all.'

What Days Are For is an extended essay on the semantics of the numinous. It is thought-provoking, and Dessaix has an elegant way of describing what is wrong with the modern world. While his worldview is very different to mine, which frequently provoked a feeling of antagonism as I read the book, I've realised I can learn a lot about myself by being aware of when other people's behaviours or beliefs trigger me, and pausing to ponder why.