The absurdity is that it goes on and on

The great Czech writer Franz Kafka was born on this day in 1883.

"The meaning of life is that it stops," Kafka wrote.

But everybody goes

English novelist Thomas Hardy was born on this day in 1840. In his novel Jude the Obscure, as his hero lay dying alone, Hardy wrote:

"Nobody came, because nobody does."

I've no burning desire to be one

On this day in 1431, Joan of Arc was burned at the stake for heresy.


"It is too readily assumed that 'non-attachment' is not only better than a full acceptance of earthly life, but that the ordinary man only rejects it because it is too difficult; in other words, that the average human being is a failed saint. It is doubtful whether this is true.


"Many people genuinely do not wish to be saints, and it is probable that some who achieve or aspire to sainthood have never felt much temptation to be human beings.

"If one could follow it to its psychological roots, one would, I believe, find that the main motive for 'non-attachment' is a desire to escape from the pain of living." -- George Orwell.

Death cured him

English poet Alexander Pope was born on this day in 1688. He was the greatest poet of the 18th century and is one of the most-quoted writers ever. ("A little learning's a dangerous thing;" "An honest man's the noblest work of God;" "The proper study of Mankind is Man").

Pope was afflicted with a type of tuberculosis that affected his spine -- he never grew past 4' 6", and was a hunchback -- and which ended his life at the age of 56. Here is how he summed things up:

"This long disease, my life."
 

Let’s just let it go, he’d told him. The cancer. Let it go. Forget about it. Don’t even bring it up.
“Let it go?” Plume had said, staring.
“That’s right.”
“I’m afraid I can’t countenance that.”
“Oh, really? If it’s saving face you’re worried about…”
“You know what I mean. It’s not something I can--”
“I know.”
“Of course I can’t compel you to…”
“No, you can’t.”
“Can I ask you what your reasoning is?”
“Sure. Go ahead.”
“All right.” Plume almost cracked a smile. “What’s your reasoning?”
“I guess it’s just something I don’t want to go through with.”
What he’d meant by that, Sully supposed, was that no matter how it turned out, whether he lived or died, he’d be disappointed. So why go to all the trouble? Besides, Plume had told him that he wouldn’t be able to drink and undergo chemotherapy. And if he couldn’t drink he might as well die.  --  Chapter 21, The Misforgotten.

A dream deferred

Martin Luther King was assassinated by James Earl Ray on this day in 1968.


“But so it is, that there is a secret affinity, a hankering after, evil in the human mind…that takes a perverse delight in mischief, since it is a never-failing source of satisfaction.

"Pure good soon grows insipid…Pain is a bitter-sweet, which never surfeits. Love turns, with a little indulgence, to indifference or disgust: Hatred alone is immortal.

"…the greatest possible good of each individual consists in doing all the mischief he can to his neighbor.” – William Hazlitt.

For more on the death of King, visit Farewells

And we are the pawns of the latter

Chess champion Bobby Fischer was born on this day in 1943. He died on January 17, 2008.


"Chess is the greatest waste of human intelligence that can be found outside of an advertising agency." -- Raymond Chandler.

Let's all set a goal for the New Year

Samuel Johnson, the English writer, lexicographer, critic, wit and subject of Boswell's Life of Johnson, died on this day in 1784. He is buried in Westminster Abbey.

"The goal of all life is death." -- Sigmund Freud.

For some of Johnson's thoughts on the subject of death (and life leading up to it), visit farewells.blogspot.com.
 
Lately, however, his days and nights on the barstool had been preoccupied with strolls down memory lane. Perhaps that signaled a new interest in life. Or a fascination with death. His summing up. Whatever it was, he’d found that the most insignificant of events, the meagerest of impressions, could trigger them, these images and their associated narratives. Just to be alive was to remember, but heretofore the buzz and hum of everyday thought had held his memories at bay, for the most part. Had the reoccurrence of desire prompted, in some way, these waves, these floods of recollections?  --  Chapter 29, The Misforgotten.

The Marquis de Shame

The Marquis de Sade (Donatien Alphonse-François de Sade) died on this day in 1814. He wrote:

"I never wonder to see men wicked, but I often wonder to see them not ashamed."

To read about the Marquis de Sade's death and last wishes, visit farewells.blogspot.com.

   “Well, Augustine said that we have a mind, or a will, which is above the body, but our bodies are always keeping us from doing what our minds will us to do.”

   “Our minds are good, but our bodies are bad?”
   “That’s basically what he said.”
   “I dunno. I got a pretty dirty mind sometimes.” Robert cackled and shot a look around the room.
--  Chapter 27, The Misforgotten.

God bless Herman Melville

Moby-Dick was published on this day in 1851. The author, Herman Melville, had a nervous breakdown four years later, in part because of his novel's dismal sales. After unsuccessful lecture tours, Melville found work as a customs inspector on the New York City docks. His oldest son committed suicide in 1867.


Melville's death on September 28, 1891, in New York, was noted with only one obituary notice. Moby-Dick sold only 3,000 copies during his lifetime.

An unfinished work, Billy Budd, Foretopman, was unpublished until 1924. The protagonist of the story, set during the war between England and France, is the innocent and angelic Billy Budd, the favorite of everyone on the crew of the HMS Bellipotent except John Claggart, the sadistic master-at-arms. Claggart falsely accuses Billy of being involved in a mutiny. Billy, unable to answer the charge because of his stammer, accidentally kills Claggart.
The ship's captain, Vere, has seen through Claggart's plot but fears rebellion if Billy isn't punished. He calls a court, which condemns Billy, who goes cheerfully to his fate and is hanged from the yardarm, right after crying out "God bless Captain Vere." When Vere is mortally wounded during an engagement with the French, he murmurs as his last words Billy's name.

"Death is only a launching into the region of the strange Untried," Melville wrote in Moby-Dick; "it is but the first salutation to the possibilities of the immense Remote, the Wild, the Watery, the Unshored..."

By day they churned down the river, Camille at the wheel, he and Cutterback drunk. They blasted music (Themes from the Great Westerns), roaring at the top of their lungs. At night they’d dock and take over a bar. Cutterback arm-wrestled all comers. They ate catfish, mountains and pyramids of it. After Camille had gone to bed they sat up on deck, listening to the water lapping at the hull. Cutterback sang, drawing out the lines he particularly relished. Sully had brought along Moby Dick. He read aloud the passages he’d marked. All men were mesmerized by the deep, Ishmael had said. They saw in it the ungraspable phantom of life.  --  Chapter 42, The Misforgotten.

He had to beg for the paper

Today is the anniversary of the birth of Martin Luther, born in 1483. He died February 18, 1546. His last words (written on a scrap of paper):


"We are beggars, this is true." 

“Luther was the foulest of monsters.” – Pope Gregory XV.

   “Montaigne thought it was healthy to always keep death in mind,” Sully had said. “Do you agree?” He himself was dying a little death of sorts, it seemed to him. The class was yawning, fidgety, silent.

   “This ain’t too good a topic,” Red finally said.
   “So you don’t agree with Montaigne?”
   “I mean this ain’t too good a topic.” He pressed a hand to the back of his neck. “Friend of ours died.”
   Sully had read of the woman who froze to death while sleeping in a Dumpster. Why hadn’t it occurred to him to…
   “I’m sorry,” he said. He closed his book and let it lie in his lap. The truth was, it dawned on him now, that everyone here did indeed keep death in mind at all times, and not as the exotic object of an exercise in philosophy but as the monstrous end to a harried existence.  --  Chapter 39, The Misforgotten.

Not at the same time, however

French author and existentialist Albert Camus was born on this day in 1913. He said:

"A single sentence will suffice for modern man: He fornicated and read the papers."
 

Then there was Camus (died in a car crash), who’d said, There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn. Was that ironic, or what? Where had his scorn gotten him? But who could say, really, maybe old Camus was sitting somewhere even now, looking on with a sneer. Or maybe he’d meant that he would overcome fate by writing scornfully. Or just by writing. Literature was greater than death.  --  Chapter 38, The Misforgotten.

Only the worms care

July 23, 1880: American mystery writer Raymond Chandler was born. In The Big Sleep, he wrote:

"Where did it matter where you lay once you were dead? In a dirty sump or in a marble tower on top of a high hill? You were dead, you were sleeping the big sleep, you were not bothered with things like that. Oil and water were the same as wind and air to you."

Fiedler had always been a superior bastard, Sully thought...

“I’m writing something, too,” Sully told him.
“Is that right? Something on the bathroom wall?”
“A detective story, dickhead.”
“Wow. Raymond Chandler, move over.”
“'What did it matter where you lay once you were dead? In a dirty sump or in a marble tower on top of a high hill?'”

“You always one for quotations.”

  --  Chapter 31, The Misforgotten

Are you serious?

Petrarch, the Italian poet, died on this day in 1374. 

"We are made to be immortal, and yet we die. It's horrible, it can't be taken seriously."  --  Eugene Ionesco.

How often had he warmed himself by the fire of fellow feeling, reveled in the commingling of like minds, kindred hearts! At a particular pitch of drunkenness, all men were brothers, and the self slipped away, receded temporarily. The only immortality Sully believed in was just this, the persistence of good will, the community of souls that would outlast heaven and earth, that would live on as a rebuke to the implacable enmity of the cosmos.  --  Chapter 15, The Misforgotten.

Wonder what a Grecian mother earns

Writer William Faulkner died on this date in 1962. Faulkner won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1949 and delivered a famous acceptance speech.  He also wrote the famous line:

"If a writer has to rob his own mother he will not hesistate; the 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' is worth any number of old ladies."

His divorce, of course, had just about put his mother under. It was then that she’d clammed up. There were no more Sunday visits from the three of them. Sully had quit going on Sundays himself. It was just awkward. His mom had lost her enthusiasm for cooking. Did Eleanor and the boy ever go on their own? She’d never said. He’d taken up with Rae Ann but had never introduced her. Then he’d quit Cutterback and started running the route. Drinking, more than ever, filled up his spare time. Then, when he’d quit Cutterback and gone into hibernation, he’d imagined she’d be happy. He’d tried to explain to her that he was writing, like he’d always wanted. Like she’d always wanted, hadn’t she? But why, she’d wanted to know, wouldn’t someone pay him to write?   --  Chapter 41, The Misforgotten.

Hiding; go seek

Franz Kafka was born on this day in 1883.  He wrote:

"Life's splendor forever lies in wait about each one of us in all its fullness, but veiled from view, deep down, invisible, far off. It is there, though, not hostile, not reluctant, not deaf. If you summon it by the right word, by its right name, it will come."

I’m reading Kafka. We’ll be passing through Prague at some point soon and perhaps I can visit his grave. Gregor thinks of his family with tenderness and love, and then just before sunrise comes “the last faint flicker of his breath.” The sun is rising out of the sea here and in a couple of hours we’ll have breakfast, which Pinto, that old dung beetle, plans to attend. Giving us our marching orders, I presume. Some day, on my deathbed maybe, I’ll think back on Pinto with tenderness and love.  --  Chapter 30, The Misforgotten.

An Earnest appraisal

Ernest Hemingway died today in 1961.

"Hemingway was a jerk."  --  Harold Robbins.

Arrogant, overbearing, bull-necked and barrel-chested, fleshy lips (speckled with bits of bun) drawn back now to disclose a row of alarmingly enormous teeth, rolled-up sleeves showing off a pair of swarthy hams, eyes at half-mast, Cutterback tipped back his huge head and swallowed the rest of his Scotch. He idolized Hemingway. The writer sits down each day to face eternity, or the lack of it, he intoned. Bullshit, Sully told him. The writer sits down to face a blank page. Maybe that was what was wrong with Hemingway.  --  Chapter 17, The Misforgotten.

Who wants company?

Blaise Pascal, French mathematician and philosopher, was born on this day in 1623. He said:

"We shall die alone."

As for God, Pascal had said that you might as well believe, because even if you were wrong nothing was lost, and if you were right, so much was to be gained. Which struck Sully as a pretty flimsy hook to hang a religion or a philosophy on, not to mention valid only if you bought into the assumption that God operated on the rewards-and-punishment system. That was a pretty threadbare kind of God to believe in, in his opinion. What kind of God made belief a prerequisite for His favor, anyway? A God who was afraid He wasn’t really real, it sounded like. -- Chapter 13, The Misforgotten.