Re: Tragic death con't

[Gary Kern <gkern@alumni.Princeton.EDU>]

GK wrote:

It is not presumptious of us to deem a person's work incomplete when he
is cut off in the full prime of his powers.  Let us take a graphic
example.  A lexicologist begins an encyclopedia of German etymology; he
projects a set of 10 volumes, A to Z.  He is working on volume 3, letter
G, and has just penned a couple of sentences on the word "Gott" when he
runs out of coffee and decides to go out and get his favorite Kenya AA.
He crosses the street, remembers that he meant to put a note "See
Visigoth," and is struck dead by a MacDonald's hamburger truck.  Is it
presumptuous to say that the young lexicologist, even given his fatal
passion for rich coffee, had not yet completed his work?

Walter answered:
> 
> "No one dies before his work is done."
> 
> This is a typical example for the kind of statement that disunites the readers
> of EJ.
> It sounds good - griffig - but its truth can never be determined. It would
> mean to know what exactly the work was and to judge whether it was done, two
> impossible prepositions, at least for me.
> 
> But thats what makes it interesting.


TF answered:

The lexicon was incomplete - his life was complete. Why judge a life
purely
on the basis of its external creative output? Perhaps the whole thing
was
already completed in his mind, as was Mozart's Requiem. Junger regularly
states that it is the moment of creation that is most valuable, whether
or
not it translates into a book or gallery painting.

GK dissents:

Now we are getting to the heart of the issue.  A human life, like it or
not, is largely (but not purely) what one has done:  both what has been
experienced and made character, and what has been expressed and made
social contact.  Who is Ernst Jünger?  The man who lived so long and
wrote so many good things.  We remember him and study his works because
of that, not because he was an interesting man like so many others who
went to war in 1914.  Nor because he was an amusing old fellow who
caught insects and collected hour glasses out in the forest.  He was
(and now is) himself AND his work.  There are some authors who are quite
boring as people, but we excuse them because of their books--they are
themselves and their books.  And those who don't write books--they are
their personalities and what they have done, said, suggested.  They are
the look in the eye on that early summer day that they were
permitted--or not permitted--to live.

Had EJ died in WWI he would have been like any other promising talent
destroyed on the battlefield, about whom we would have to say, following
the aged EJ's example, that their lives were complete, because no one
dies before his work is done.  In short, he would have been a
statistic.  But fortunately for him his task was done at the age of 102,
not 19.  That's why we know anything about him.  That's why he is EJ.

You see, EJ is pulling a philosophical trick, a sleight of hand:  When
someone dies we are forced to sum up that life and put the best
interpretation on it.  That is post factum.  EJ wants to put that
necessary summary a minute before the death, to make it a priori.  This
means that at this moment your life is done, if you die the next.  But
if you live the next, then your life wasn't done and you hadn't
completed your task.  Pure sophistry.

When President Clinton went to Dallas on November 22, 1963, his work was
not done, his life was not complete.  Part of the shock the nation
sustained on that day was the necessity of suddenly accepting that life
as complete, of having to sum up his Presidency as a finished term and
to adjust to a new and quite different administration.  It tooks months,
maybe years, with all sorts of psychological repercussions.  Now we can
look back calmly and judge JFK and his Presidency as a complete unit, a
historical moment, but even now we cannot say that JFK had completed his
task before his assassination.  It is not only a reversal of reality and
an absolution of the assassin(s), but bad historical interpretation.

Yukio Mishima was done before he died:  he finished the last page of the
third novel in his trilogy, seized hostages, made a dramatic speech and
committed hari-kiri.  Jan Sibelius was done before he died:  he finished
his 7th symphony, tried an 8th and decided it was worse, so he burned
it.  He ceased composing and died years later.  Ernst Jünger was done
before he died, and was no doubt ready to die for a good 20 years.  But
Silvestre Revueltas, the Mexican composer, who was writing a great
profusion of imaginative scores and planning so many things, when at age
40 he got on his bicycle and suddenly...

And therefore the millions of people killed in this century by horrible
accidents were not done.  And the millions of people killed by horrible
diseases were not done.  And the millions of people killed by despots of
all colors and stripes, by thugs, idiots and bastards, were not done. It
is a philosophical witticism, but a moral dishonor, to say that they
were.

GK