There is yet a third category of people--those who did not make it to public consciousness. Composers who failed to get performed, or who were imprisoned and died in concentration camps or in Siberian wastes. We can speak of them only in the abstract, since we don't know them individually. But individually their lives were cut off, and no one writes a post- mortem story about them. Only to themselves, in their misery before death, could they sum up their lives and hope for a moment of meaning. In other words, the 12 million or more Ukrainian peasants who starved to death during Stalin's enforced famine of 1933-34 have meaning in the history books, they tell a story "as good as the most carefully composed epic," but Comrade Three Million Seven Hundred Thousand and Thirty-Three leaves no trace, at most a scratch mark, and dies without fulfillment, meaning or notice. What is for him is definitely not good. I think that J=81nger's fatalistic thought can save us from excessive worry about our accomplishments or excessive grief about our losses, but it risks being used a panacea for all ills. We must retain the human perspective and try to get things done, or else flatten ourselves out into fatalistic yogis whose perspective is the same as that of the indifferent stars. As for sensing in advance that the story will be told, one way or the other, where's the wonder? GK
Markup © John King, 2008. Web archive generated Tue, 21st August 2007.