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- Herausgeber: Fitzcarraldo Editions
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
In 1937, Elias Canetti began collecting notes for the project that 'by definition, he could never live to complete', as translator Peter Filkins writes in his afterword. The Book Against Death is the work of a lifetime: a collection of Canetti's aphorisms, diatribes, musings and commentaries on and against death – published in English for the first time since his death in 1994 – interspersed with material from philosophers and writers including Goethe, Walter Benjamin and Robert Walser. This major work by the 1981 Nobel Prize in Literature laureate is a disarming and often darkly comic reckoning with the inevitability of death and with its politicization, evoking despair at the loss of loved ones and the impossibility of facing one's own death, while fiercely protesting the mass deaths incurred during war and the willingness of the despot to wield death as power. Infused with fervour and vitality, The Book Against Death ultimately forms a moving affirmation of the value of life itself.
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5
‘One of our great imaginers and solitary men of genius.’
— Iris Murdoch
‘Rarely has anyone been so at home in the mind, with so little ambivalence. Far from being a source of complacency, this attitude is Canetti’s great strength…. [He] is someone who has felt in a profound way the responsibility of words…. His work eloquently and nobly defends tension, exertion, moral and amoral seriousness.’
— Susan Sontag, New York Review of Books
‘Canetti invites – indeed, compels – judgement. His exacting presence honours literature.’
— George Steiner, New Yorker
‘Canetti led his life without compromise, fear, or guilt, and [reading him is] like discovering, without warning, a complex and satisfying work of art.’
— David Denby, New Yorker
‘The erudition is genuinely awe-inspiring.’
— Salman Rushdie
‘Before there was the mysterious W. G. Sebald, there was the even more mysterious Elias Canetti.’
— Clive James, New York Times
‘By virtue of his abundant wit and stylistic pithiness, Canetti stands out as one of the foremost aphorists of our time, a man who, in his phrasing of life’s ironies, is sometimes reminiscent of great predecessors like La Bruyère and Lichtenberg.’
— Swedish Academy, Nobel Prize in Literature 1981
7
The Book Against Death
elias canetti
translated from the german by peter filkins
Contents
Introduction
by joshua cohen
‘Quixotic’ is a word that comes to mind when thinking of Elias Canetti, not just because Cervantes’ novel was his favourite novel, but because Canetti too was a man from La Mancha. His paternal family hailed from Cañete, a Moorish-fortified village in modern-day Cuenca Province, Castile-La Mancha, from which they were scattered in the mass expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492. Having fared better under Muslim rule than Catholic, the Cañetes passed through Italy, where their name was respelled, and settled in Adrianople – today’s Edirne, Turkey, near the Greek and Bulgarian borders – before moving on to Rusçuk, a port town on the Danube known in Bulgarian as Ruse, whose thriving Sephardic colony supported itself by trading between two empires, the Ottoman and the Austro-Hungarian. Elias, the first of three boys, was born to Jacques Canetti and Mathilde Arditti in Ruse in 1905 and in childhood was whisked away to England, where Jacques took over the local office of the import-export firm established by Mathilde’s brothers. In 1912, a year after the family’s arrival in Manchester, Jacques died suddenly of a heart attack and Mathilde took her brood via Lausanne to Vienna and then, in 1916, in the midst of the First World War, to neutral Zurich. There Canetti acquired, or was acquired by, the German language, which would become his primary language, though it was already his fifth, after – in chronological order – Ladino, Bulgarian, English, and French. Following a haphazard education in Zurich, Frankfurt and Berlin, Canetti returned to Vienna to study chemistry and medicine, but spent most 10of his energies on literature, especially on writing plays that were never produced, though he often read them aloud, doing all the voices. At the time, his primary influence was journalistic – the feuilletons of Karl Kraus – which might have been a way of giving himself the necessary distance from the German-language novels of the Viennese generation preceding his own, the doorstops of Hermann Broch and Robert Musil, both of whom were known to him personally. His own contribution to fiction – his sole contribution to that quixotic art – came in 1935 with Die Blendung (The Blinding), which concerns a Viennese bibliophile and Sinologist who winds up being immolated along with his library. Die Blendung was translated into English as Auto-da-Fé – a preferred punishment of the Inquisition – though Elias’ original suggestion for the English-language title was Holocaust. In nearly all the brief biographical notes on Canetti, this is where the break comes: when he abandons the theatre, publishes his only fiction, and escapes the Nazis by leaving the continent. Exile brought him to England again, and to nonfiction, specifically to Masse und Macht (Crowds and Power), a study of ‘the crowd,’ be that in the form of an audience, a protest movement or political demonstration, or a rowdy group threatening to riot – any assemblage in which constituent individuality has been dissolved and re-bonded into a mass, as in the chemical reactions in which Canetti was schooled, or as in the atomic reactions that threaten planetary existence. Canetti’s singular study of collective behaviour, published in 1960, stands at the centre of his corpus, along with his remarkable series of memoirs, each named for a single sense: The Tongue Set Free, The Torch in My Ear, The Play of the Eyes. Five volumes were projected, but the series went unfinished: no volume connected to smell 11or touch was ever completed and the final year of his life covered in the memoirs is 1937, the year Canetti’s mother died and he began to conceive of a book ‘against’ death, a version of which – the only available version of which – can be found on the pages that follow.
*
15 June 1942
Five years ago today my mother died. Since then my world has turned inside out. To me it is as if it happened just yesterday. Have I really lived five years, and she knows nothing of it? I want to undo each screw of her coffin’s lid with my lips and haul her out. I know that she is dead. I know that she has rotted away. But I can never accept it as true. I want to bring her to life again. Where do I find parts of her? Mostly in my brothers and me. But that is not enough. I need to find every person whom she knew. I need to retrieve every word she ever said. I need to walk in her steps and smell the flowers she smelled, the great-grandchild of every blossom that she held up to her powerful nostrils. I need to piece back together the mirrors that once reflected her image. I want to know every syllable she could have possibly said in any language. Where is her shadow? Where is her fury? I will loan her my breath. She should walk on my own two legs.
Note the date: a week or so after the Battle of Midway, not to mention the United States declaring war on Bulgaria (along with Romania and Hungary) and the Black Saturday when British and South African forces evacuated the Gazala Line. This isn’t quite Kafka’s remark on a summer day twenty-eight years earlier: 12‘Germany has declared war on Russia. Swimming in the afternoon,’ but it’s close. Canetti clings to his mother’s demise as generalized Thanatos mobilizes all around him. An estimated 50-56 million soldiers and civilians died in the Second World War, along with an additional 20-some-million deaths from war-related diseases and famine, and yet Canetti appears to hold with Kurt Tucholsky: a single death is a tragedy, a million a statistic.
‘It begins with the fact that we count the dead. Through death each should become a single entity, like God.’ Those are the opening sentences of Canetti’s posthumous Das Buch gegen den Tod (The Book Against Death), and no one has any idea whether he would have approved of them. Having apprenticed under the sign of the unfinished, unfinishable work – Kafka again – Canetti was disturbed to find that, when it came to his death-book, he couldn’t even start: he couldn’t even find the first lines that would enable a start, so he resigned himself to the accumulation of pensées, aphorisms, notes-to-self and notes-to-others, which he intended to later rearrange into what he was certain would be his masterwork, a capstone and a headstone. Sixty-five years later, nearly 2000 pages of material later, Canetti succumbed to his subject, dying in Switzerland in 1994, and leaving behind a manuscript that he sometimes referred to as drafts-toward-a-book and sometimes referred to as the book itself, a contradiction that was embraced by his German editors (a team that included his daughter and his German-language biographer) who put together this present abridgement, published in German in 2014.
If I suggest that this book is itself ‘a survivor,’ it’s only to moot the term and assess Canetti’s strange, almost profane employment of it. To Canetti, a survivor is 13not the person who has managed to escape death in a ghetto, concentration camp or gulag, so much as he is the person who runs the ghetto, concentration camp, or gulag; a person who sentences people to death in pursuit of social or societal control and to maintain a hold on power. Counterintuitively, a classic Canettian survivor is a Hitler, a Stalin, a Hussein, a Putin; a dictator without limits, who stoops to every deceit and act of violence to perpetuate his reign, slaughtering his fellow man as a means – and increasingly as the only means – of forestalling his own inevitable mortality.
A survivor lives only because others have died for him (has there even been a better definition of an anti-Christ?), and it’s that contingency that guilted Canetti for having passed the war in the relative safety of Hampstead. As if to justify his continued existence, he set out in the shadow of genocide to write daily about his intimate deaths, especially about the deaths of his mother and of his first wife Veza and of his favourite brother Georg; and after the armistice, he extended this diaristic discipline through the headlines of the Vietnam War, the fall of Communism, the Yugoslav and Gulf Wars, and the more private tragedy that was his winning of the Nobel Prize in Literature (‘it’s a kind of leprosy’).
Those seeking a system among these decades of decay-themed entries will find none: Canetti mistrusted systems, from the Hegelian dialectic (where there is death, there can be no synthesis), to the motley Marxisms and Freudianisms that he regarded as ideological ‘survivors,’ explanations-of-the-world that remained and sustained only because they’d conquered and consumed all other explanations, along with all non-explaining art. In this book in particular, all intellectual systems or methods pale beside death, which 14is the absolute taxon or order-bringing entity whose definitive sorting of humanity into those ‘present’ and those ‘passed’ or ‘past’ must be resisted by the processes of memory, and by reading and writing.
This is Canetti’s core heuristic – he has no plan or programme, but he has a heuristic – which is implied in the book’s very title. The Book Against Death, like so much having to do with resting-in-peace, has its eeriest meaning obscured by the Latin tradition and the plethora of libri contra, such as Augustine’s Contra Academicos and Aquinas’ Contra Errores Graecorum and Summa contra Gentiles. Those works are apologetics, correctives whose contrariety – whose ‘againstness’ – is a matter of rhetoric or polemic: the Emperor Julian writes contra the Galileans because he’s sure the Galileans are wrong; their Christianity is merely apostate Judaism and they should return to the old ways of the pagan Imperium; Cyril of Alexandria writes contra Julian, in response, and calls him the apostate, and so on. Canetti’s liber contra mortem is different: it is not just ‘against’ death in the sense that it regards death as incorrect (‘But no death is natural’), it is also ‘against’ death in the sense that it seeks to ‘defeat death,’ to magically, mystically, apotropaically make death die purely through the force of its sentences, presenting its wordings as warding-spells to annul the reaper or at least dull his scythe.
This book, in our reading of it as in Canetti’s writing of it, is a type of life-traveller’s talisman or amulet, a prose garlic bulb or rabbit’s foot, or a version of the Balsam of Fierabrás, say, that balm used to treat the wounds of the crucified Christ, barrels of which the legendary Saracen giant Fierabrás was said to have filched from Rome, or Jerusalem, and brought back to Spain, where its recipe was passed down to Quixote, who 15administers it to himself and Sancho Panza. ‘It’s a balm,’ the original man from La Mancha says, ‘the formula for which I’ve memorized, by means of which one needn’t fear death, nor worry about dying from any wound.’
This book – this powerfully gnomic, mad-sincere book – is a similar vouchsafe for those who consider themselves ‘Death’s Enemy,’ a character Canetti posits as the ultimate incarnation of the heroic knight-errant. Quixote, who never relents, who abhors surrender, and who believes in himself and his questing more than he believes in any church, is healed and restored by quaffing the concoction, whereas Sancho Panza – precisely because he fears dying, precisely because he worries about suffering – sips and spends the long long night ‘discharg[ing] from both ends,’ which is to say barfing and shitting, shitting and barfing.
‘Not since I could think on my own have I ever called anyone “Lord!”, and how easy it is to say “Lord!” and how great the temptation,’ Canetti tells us of his own faith, founded in a fundamental contempt, ‘I have approached a hundred gods, and I looked each straight in the eye, full of hatred for the death of human beings.’
Joshua Cohen, New York, November 202316
The Book Against Death
Cemeteries for the Stillborn
It begins with the fact that we count the dead. Through death each should become a single entity, like God. One dead person plus another do not make two. It would be better to count the living, given how perishable that number already is.
Entire cities and districts can mourn as if all their men had fallen, all their sons and fathers. But so long as 11,370 have fallen, they will forever seek to have it add up to a million.
Ants and Death
The ant knows nothing of our illnesses and epidemics. You don’t even notice when an ant dies, for it so easily lives again. In regard to this, Miss Feld performed some rather cruel, but convincing, experiments. Of seven ants that she kept underwater for eight days, four came alive again. Others she starved, giving them nothing but a little water on a sterilized sponge. Nine Formica subsericea lasted between 70 and 106 days. Among the many creatures in the experiment there were indeed only three instances of cannibalism. And on days twenty, thirty-five, sixty-two and seventy of their imposed fast, several half-starved ants managed to share a drop of honey with those whose condition was clearly hopeless. The ants were only sensitive to cold. But even then, they did not die, but rather fell asleep, opting for an economical and practical state of torpor to quietly await the return of the sun.
The knowledge of death appears to be the most consequential experience of human history. It turned into the acceptance of death. Deliberate killing among us is only possible once we know that the deceased is to a certain degree dead. 20The vanishing, the sudden and secret rapture of the great and the holy, because they are not allowed to die.
The Grantor of Years – A Benefactor
Imagine granting your own years to others. Someone gives to others, whose worth he values, a number of his own years in order to prolong theirs. Say that it has been prophesied that he will live a long time, that he knows he will reach his hundredth birthday. Therefore, after making thorough inquiries while travelling around, he decides who needs his years. He parses them out quite thoughtfully, not too many, not too few – a strenuous occupation. In the time that he has left to him, he considers what the best use of what he is sacrificing could be. The news about his extraordinary undertaking spreads fast. He falls prey to speculators who want to make money from his years. They try to convince him of the value of their clients, their general importance and usefulness, even though in truth they are ancient, ridiculous little old ladies who have a lot of money and even more hunger for a couple more ridiculous little years. So, the speculators manufacture important people, because for the benefactor, an incorruptible figure, it’s just a matter of paying out the money. The reduced number of his years makes them ever more valuable; the fewer of them that remain, the more people desire to savour some for themselves. What develops is a kind of system of stocks that are traded and which reach incredibly high prices. Those who earlier, before speculation began, were granted years are rooted out and pressured to forsake their rights in any way possible. The years are then split into months and weeks. An organisation forms among those who acquired their claims by paying for them, complete with an executive 21committee and elections. They most of all have to keep an eye out for the moment when the benefactor will reach the long-ago fixed limit of his life. Up until that moment what remains belongs to them.
On the night following the fourteenth Sha’bán (the eighth month of the Muslim year) special services are held in all the mosques. The traditional reason is that ‘on this night the lote tree of Paradise, on the leaves of which are inscribed the names of all living persons, is shaken, and the leaf of any mortal who is predestined to die during the ensuing year falls withering to the ground.’
His knack for doing everything at the worst of all times. The depressing messiness of time, which causes him to feel as if he cannot tolerate its irreversibility. If he were able to execute matters in the correct sequence, he fears that he would accept death, towards which any series of events leads.
Chinese Seamen ‘Reincarnated’
‘Fifty-four Chinese seamen, threatened with deportation from Canada for refusing to go to sea again after they had been torpedoed, claimed they were Canadian by reincarnation. They said that they died in the Atlantic, after their ship was torpedoed, and were reincarnated in a Canadian vessel that picked them up. The Canadian authorities disputed this claim and the Chinese must go to sea again.’
‘Certainly, animals are conscious of a very real uneasiness in the presence of the death of one of their own kind. None of them, however, make any pretence of burying their dead ceremonially. The first recorded examples of the latter come from the age of the so-called Neanderthal 22men, some 50 to 100,000 years, BCE.’
The Last Words of Bourignon (1680)
‘If I die, I die against the will of God…’
‘The sun and death are two things we cannot stare into the eye of.’
— La Rochefoucauld
26 August 1942 Stalingrad
‘The last day’s fighting has been largely hand-to-hand with tommy-guns and bayonets. The dead are so thick upon the ground that there has been no time to bury even a tenth of them.
Reports from the front have described how the German armies solved this problem using field incinerators, not unlike large camp cookers in appearance.’
The story of a man who does not want anyone to survive him.
Died going to shelter
‘Hearing the sirens on Monday night, Charles Stephens Evans, a sixty-seven-year-old labourer, of Newport Street, Lambeth, got out of bed, and was on his way to a shelter when he collapsed and died in the street.’
Stalingrad
‘They had time to bury their own dead in a brotherly grave.’
‘What is certain about death is made a bit more palatable through what is uncertain about it; the uncertainty of just 23when it will occur gives rise to the feeling of unending, and from that what one calls eternity.’
— La Bruyère
Death of an Australian
‘A man had been found dying of spear wounds out in the bush, and [was] carried to the Mission as he was breathing his last. I watched two of the lay brothers bearing the stretcher to one of the huts, a horde of natives following. I noticed that they held their burden curiously high in the air. Suddenly, as the dying man was lowered for entry to a doorway, the natives crowding round, to my horror, fell upon the body, and put their lips to his in brutal eagerness to inhale the last breath. They believed that in doing so they were absorbing his strength and virtue, and his very vital spark, and all the warnings of the “white father” would not keep them from it. The man was of course dead when we extricated him, and it was a ghostly sight to see the lucky “breath catcher” scoop in his cheeks as he swallowed the “spirit breath” that gave him double hunting power.’
— Daisy Bates, The Passing of the Aborigines
The Death of Thomas More
More ‘laying his head upon the block, bade the executioners stay until he had removed aside his beard, saying that that had never committed any treason.’
The Dead are Married to One Another
‘When one man has had a son, and another man a daughter, although both may have been dead for many years, they have a practise of contracting a marriage between their deceased children, and of bestowing the girl upon the youth. They at the same time paint upon pieces of 24paper human figures to represent attendants with horses and other animals, dresses of all kinds, money and every article of furniture; and all these, together with the marriage contract, which is regularly drawn up, they commit to the flames, so that through the medium of the smoke (as they believe) these things may be conveyed to their children in the other world, and that they may become husband and wife in due form. After this ceremony, the fathers and mothers consider themselves mutually related, in the same manner, as if a real connection had taken place between their living children.’
— Marco Polo
The only entry for the year 1839 from Grillparzer’s Diary
‘Fröhlich’s maid spoke about her father, whom she “loved so much”, and how she helped with the washing and dressing of his body when he died, the stark coldness of it, how unbearable it was to her. So then she thought: if a “young and healthy person” were to lie down next to him, perhaps the warmth could revive him. That night, when everyone was asleep, she lay down next to her father in his bed and stayed with him the entire night. The next morning others didn’t know where she was and looked for her everywhere until she was finally found half-numb next to the corpse. A vigorous beating was the reward for this allopathic attempt to heal. There is something grisly, but also heroic in such tender folly.’
1942
In order to manifest death entirely, she looks for insects to kill.
He wants to die in secret, so that no one feels triumphant, and for his last meal he’ll eat his will.
The urgency of the dead: they want to get away as fast as possible from the explosions.
No one will survive him; anyone who could stand him is dead.
Too little attention is paid to what remains alive of the dead and is dispersed among others; no method has been conceived to nourish these dispersed remains and to keep them alive for as long as possible.
The friends of a dead man gather together on appointed days and talk only about him. They make him even more dead when they only say good things about him. They should quarrel instead, take sides for or against him, talk about his secret escapades. So long as there is something surprising to say about him, he changes in their view and is not dead. The piety involved in preserving a fixed notion of him is not at all kind. It rises out of fear and will only keep him somewhere harmless, such as in the coffin and in the ground. So that the dead man, by the slimmest of margins, can continue to live, he must be allowed to move. He should be angry, as before, and in anger should require an unexpected curse word that is known only to the one who reports it. He should become tender; those 26who knew him as hard-hearted and uncaring should suddenly learn how loving he could be. One almost wishes that each friend will have a different role to play for the dead man, and out of all of them together he will then exist. One could also allow the younger and uninitiated to take part in these gatherings, so that they can learn as much as possible about someone who was unknown to them. Certain objects associated with him should be passed from hand to hand, and it would be lovely when, at each annual gathering, a new and unfamiliar object is brought along that holds a story.
The word ‘freedom’ gives rise to an important enticement, perhaps the most important enticement that can be expressed. We always wish to get away, and when there is no name for where we want to get to, when we do not know and there is no border in between, then we call it ‘freedom’.
The spatial sense of this enticement is the deep wish to step across a border as if it were not there. The freedom of flight stretches back to the ancient, mythic urge to reach the sun. The freedom of time involves the conquering of death, and one is indeed happy the farther and farther it can be pushed off. The freedom in relation to things is the disappearance of prices, and the ideal prodigal, a very free man, wishes for nothing so much as to be uninfluenced by and not needing to worry about constantly changing prices, which always go up and down, much like the weather and for no good reason. There is no such thing as a ‘bit’ of freedom, for its grace and happiness entices the man who wants to break through whatever holds him back, and he always wishes for this in order to free himself from the worst restraints. Anyone who wants to kill has to deal with the awful consequences that come with 27the law against killing, and if these consequences weren’t such a threat, he would certainly embrace even more satisfying enticements. However the source of freedom lies in breathing. You can breathe any air, and the freedom to breathe is the only freedom that to this day has not really been destroyed.
Molière’s death: He cannot stop acting. The great roles that he plays, and the applause which the theatre showers upon him, means too much to him. His friends urge him again and again to give up acting, but he resists their well-meaning suggestions. Even on the day of his death he said he could not deny his fellow actors the chance to earn a living. In reality it was about the applause, for it appears he could not live without it. So it is curious that on the day of his funeral a hostile crowd gathered before his house, the very opposite of the crowds he encountered in the theatre. They were there out of religious conviction, but as if knowing that they were secretly linked with the clapping crowds of the theatre, they dispersed when money was tossed to them – namely the ticket sales that were returned.
The dead are nourished on judgement, the living on love.
The ‘slain’ – how grand that sounds, how expansive, how embracing and brave; the ‘suffocated’, the ‘crushed’, the ‘charred’, the ‘exploded’: how cheap they all sound, as if no price had been paid!
There is no longer any way to measure anything once the length of a human life is no longer the measure.
He wants to return to the lush, splendid world in which 28no one dies and people have their wars fought by ants, which are very human.
Human beings are eternal to the degree that they care for the eternal – unless of course they drown in it.
It’s too easy to die. It should be much harder to die.
The promise of immortality is all that is needed to set up a religion. The simple command to kill is all that is needed to wipe out three-fourths of humanity. What do people want – to live or to die? They want to live and to kill, and as long as they want that, they will have to be satisfied with various promises about immortality.
Revenge is a curse, and should they slay my dearest brother, I will have nothing to do with revenge. Instead, I want different human beings.
Wars are fought for their own sake. So long as people don’t admit that, there will never actually be any way to oppose them.
He hopes, without God noticing, to live a long time.
Above all, you are afraid of what does not come after death.
Immortality is hardest for the miser.
O, if only I had died 10,000 years ago, and already lived again three times since.
He loves the wind and lets himself be incinerated to at last 29be carried off by it.
On each of his birthdays he holds a little funeral celebration for himself, for isn’t it possible that he could have died already?
He never wants to die again.
15 February 1942
Today I decided that I will record thoughts against death as they occur to me, without any kind of structure and without submitting them to any tyrannical plan. I cannot let this war pass without hammering out a weapon within my heart that will conquer death. It will be tortuous and insidious, perfectly suited to it. In better times I would wield it as a joke or a brazen threat. I think of the act of bagging death as a masquerade. Employing fifty disguises and numerous plots is how I’d do it. But now death has switched masks yet again. No longer content with its ongoing daily victory, death grabs whatever it can. It riddles the air and the seas; whether the smallest or the largest, it doesn’t matter, for it wants it all, and it has no time for anything else. Nor do I have any time. I have to nab it wherever I can, nail it here and there in first-rate sentences. At the moment, I cannot house it in any coffins, much less embalm it, much less lay the embalmed to rest in a gated mausoleum.
Pascal was thirty-nine years old when he died; I will soon be thirty-seven. That means I have barely two years left, which isn’t much time! He left behind his scattered defence of Christianity. I want to gather my thoughts on the defence of the human in the face of death.
He longs for the Sirens: As if death could be withstood if 30it were announced loudly enough.
You shall not die (the First Commandment).
Someone who lives a long time to put off seeing again the dead father whom he fears. The definition of the lost son.
He would rather have died than be dead – that’s how much he thinks about every nuance.
No, said my friend, as he chewed on the barrel of his revolver, I still want to die.
The Sirens’ only art was that of moaning. It sounded as if they lay dying of love. Therefore, out of love, someone wished to save their lives. Yet they outlived the one who wished to save them and continued writhing in their death throes out of love.
A prize competition for who gets a long life.
His last wish: One last sneeze.
Dying caught him in the act.
It is certainly annoying that in our relation to death two opposing concerns are involved: the death of others and one’s own death. It is difficult to separate the two and we often mean ourselves when yammering on about others. Nevertheless, we cannot let ourselves be discouraged. The keening of simple folk is such a meaningful experience; it sinks so indelibly into the consciousness of any who get caught up in it that one cannot doubt the continued need for such a ritual, even among ourselves. We 31prefer our funerals as cold as the stones found in our cemeteries, and the dead like to be dressed so lightly and gathered into heaven as soft as angels. It won’t be long until keening once again has the power of incantation and then, as opposed to earlier, the dead will really rise from their graves.
He could not die before he’d read all his obituaries and corrected them.
15 June 1942
Five years ago today my mother died. Since then my world has turned inside out. To me it is as if it happened just yesterday. Have I really lived five years, and she knows nothing of it? I want to undo each screw of her coffin’s lid with my lips and haul her out. I know that she is dead. I know that she has rotted away. But I can never accept it as true. I want to bring her to life again. Where do I find parts of her? Mostly in my brothers and me. But that is not enough. I need to find every person whom she knew. I need to retrieve every word she ever said. I need to walk in her steps and smell the flowers she smelled, the great-grandchild of every blossom that she held up to her powerful nostrils. I need to piece back together the mirrors that once reflected her image. I want to know every syllable she could have possibly said in any language. Where is her shadow? Where is her fury? I will loan her my breath. She should walk on my own two legs.
I fear living historians. If they’re dead, I read them gladly.
He hid under the bed so she would not die, for he had heard so much about deathbeds.32
‘Very necessary qualifications’ for a good Persian storyteller ‘In addition to having read all the known books on love and heroism, the teller of stories must have suffered greatly for love, have lost his beloved, drunk much good wine, wept with many in their sorrow, have looked often upon death and have learned much about birds and beasts. He must also be able to change himself into a beggar or a caliph in the twinkling of an eye.’
He lay there comfortably at death’s door.
We are more serious than animals are. What do animals know about death!
Mosquitos eat him alive: gobbled up by the swarm, he dances about in the sun.
Today, anyone who says anything against death is ridiculous. It’s like someone who doesn’t drink milk, but eats rats and worms instead. Death is in fashion. People go looking for it. It shows up on its own. It is honourable. It is on the side of the Fatherland, and what could be more holy than combining the father and the land? It rolls on like a tank. It explodes. It is faster than anything. It outdoes everyone. It fights on all sides. It knows only Fatherlanders, it isn’t biased. God has an old alliance with it. He calls him now and then to serve, as an angel. Death is dutiful. It follows orders. It issued them earlier itself. It is punctual, it has a pact with the clock. It only seems corrupt: whoever looks more closely must admit that it always ends the same way. It yields like rubber. But does it yield at all? A heart held in its grip can sometimes be sewn back together. But eventually it comes after the one wielding the needle. It is amusing, because all fear it, even 33the Fatherlanders. There is nothing more amusing than being feared; out of fear it will rise up, like love from the sea. It is opposed to terror; when it steps forth in terror it is only to reduce terror to fear. It inures people to life and teaches them to love that which terrifies them. It is also pleased to cost nothing. Moreover, everything about it is sensible. It wears brightly checked pants to make constant change more familiar. It plays the nose flute, because it is for the most part silent and sometimes has to lure someone in. It has very long toes, but they have no nails, because they have all been ripped out by others during their death throes. Its heels consist of splayed hooves; on its elbows are finger-long teeth. It eats both forwards and backwards, and on both sides, and takes no pleasure from wolfing down anything. It shits nothing, O death, where are your bowels! Kinsmen await the droppings. Whatever comes out would be received, welcomed, nourished and cherished and cosseted. Yet it is stingy and leaves no stool. It only hears out of one ear, the other remains deaf. Its eyes flutter softly, accompanying the nose flute. Its hair is always singed and falls out in rotten, stinking clumps.
And God looks on as one person after another dies.
1943
Renounce anyone who tolerates death. Who does that leave?
The dead are afraid of the living. However, the living who do not know this are afraid of the dead.
Science betrayed itself by becoming an end in itself. It has now become a religion, a religion of killing, and it wishes us to believe that in evolving from the traditional religion of dying to the religion of killing progress has been made. Very soon science will have to be brought under the sway of a higher power that will press it into service without destroying it. There’s not much time left for this subjugation to occur. It likes being treated like a religion and is anxious to exterminate human beings before someone has the courage to depose it. Thus, knowledge really is power, but run-away power that is shamelessly worshipped. Its worshippers are content to receive locks of hair or flakes of dandruff, as there is nothing else to snatch up while pressed down by the weight of its heavy, artificial feet.
We should also not ignore the worst things done by death, for they feel it is vital that they live on in any way possible.
The most audacious thing about life is that it hates death, and the religions that obliterate this hate are contemptible and desperate.
If any advice, any technical advice I were to give, led to the death of a single person, I could not claim any further 35right to my own life.
‘Culture’ is concocted out of the vanities of its promoters. It is a dangerous love potion that distracts us from death. The purest expression of culture is an Egyptian tomb, where everything that is vain lies about – utensils, jewellery, nourishment, paintings, sculpture, prayers – and yet the dead person is still not alive.
What strategies, what subterfuges, what pretexts and deceits would we not employ if only to have the deceased be alive again.
To live at least long enough to know all human customs and events; to retrieve all of life that has passed, since we are denied that which will come; to pull yourself together before you disappear; to be worthy of your own birth; to think of the sacrifices made at the expense of others’ every breath; to not glorify suffering, even though you are alive because of it; to only keep for yourself that which cannot be given away until it is ripe for others and hands itself on; to hate every person’s death as if it were your own, and to at last be at peace with everything, but never with death.
And what is the original sin of the animals? Why do animals suffer death?
In war people act as if they have to avenge the deaths of all of their ancestors, and as if not one died a natural death.
It’s nice to think of the gods as the precursors of our own human immortality. It is less pleasant to think of the one God and how He appropriates everything.36
O, the animals, beloved, savage, dying animals; flailing about, gobbled up, digested and consumed; digested and rotting in their own blood; fleeing, conjoined, lonely, spotted, hounded, shattered; uncreated, robbed by God, abandoned to an illusory life like foundlings!
The curse of having to die should be turned into a blessing. That we can still die, even when it is unbearable to live.
We should not be terrified of those who feel melancholic. They suffer from a type of hereditary indigestion. They complain as if they were being eaten alive and trapped in a stranger’s stomach. Jonah would rather be Jeremiah. What they say is in fact what they have in their own stomachs; the voice of assassinated prey only renders death enticing. ‘Come to me,’ it says. ‘Where I am is decay. Don’t you see how much I love decay?’ But decay itself dies, and the melancholic, suddenly recuperated, leaves quietly and abruptly for the hunt.
For many years nothing has moved or consumed me more than thoughts of death. The totally concrete and sincere, constant goal of my life is the attainment of immortality for every human. There were times when I wanted to make this the central figure of a novel that I would call ‘Death’s Enemy’. During this war it became clear to me that one must speak directly and openly of one’s convictions about such important matters, which are tantamount to a religion. Thus I note down everything I can about death that I would want to share with others, leaving behind ‘Death’s Enemy’ entirely for now. I can’t say that this will remain the case; it could be that he will be resurrected in the coming years in a different 37form than I had imagined earlier. In the novel he should fail at his extensive undertakings. I planned a noble death for him: he would be hit by a meteor. Maybe what bothers me most today is the idea that he should fail. He can’t fail. But I cannot allow him to be victorious while people die in the millions. In both cases what is intended as bitterly serious would seem merely ironic. I would look ridiculous. Nothing will be accomplished with the cowardly depiction of a character in a novel. I have to fall on this field of honour, even if they bury me like a nameless mutt, denounce me as a raving lunatic, and shun me as a bitter, hard-headed, unappeasable thorn in their side.
How many will think it worthwhile to live once we no longer die.
It is exhilarating to see how each makes up his own tradition. We must bring to the new, which tugs at everyone, many old counterbalances. We run to people and times of the past as if we could grab them by the horns, and then run away in terror when they resist with manic fury. India, we say seriously and knowingly, as soon as we bolt from Buddha. Egypt, we say, as soon as we have finished ‘Isis and Osiris’ in the third chapter of Plutarch. It is indeed good that we now know for sure that people with these names lived in the flesh, and that hardly have we named them before they run furiously to us. How much they wish to live again! How they beg and glare and threaten! How they believe we mean them because we call their names, and how they forget what they themselves did to the ancients! Did Thales and Solon not travel to Egypt? Was the white Chinese pilgrim not at the court of Harsha in India? Did Cortés not cheat Montezuma out of his empire and his very life? Someone discovered the cross but 38they themselves brought it. The ancients should breathe so that we see them for real, but they should also remain beyond, among the shades. They should doze but await our beckoning, and the next moment present themselves before us. They should think nothing of themselves, for they have no blood. They should flutter, not stomp; leave their horns among the shades; not bare powerful teeth, make themselves fearful and appeal for leniency. Because there is no empty space for them, their air has long been used up. Like thieves they must slip off into dreams and there be apprehended.
To present death as if it did not exist. A community in which it seems no one has any idea of death. In the language of this people there is no word for death, nor is there ever any conscious euphemism for it. Even if someone thought to break the laws, and especially the first unwritten and unspoken commandment against speaking of death, he would find no word for it that other people could understand. No one is buried and no one is cremated. No one has ever seen a corpse. People disappear, no one knows where to. A feeling of shame suddenly drives them away. Since to be alone is sinful, no one speaks of those who are absent. Often they come back to the living, and we are happy when they return. The time of withdrawal and loneliness is regarded as a bad dream we should not feel compelled to discuss. From such journeys into oblivion, pregnant women bring back children, giving birth to them alone, and sometimes even die at home during childbirth. Tiny little children suddenly wander off and away.
It will one day become obvious that with each death people take a turn for the worse.39
If life became much longer, would death no longer seem an escape?
The convulsive tenderness we feel for people when we know they soon could die; the disdain for what we once thought or did not think was good or bad about them, this irresponsible love for their lives, for their body, their eyes, their breath! And once they are fully recovered, how much more we love them, how we beg them to never again die!
Sometimes I think that as soon as I acknowledge death, the world will dissolve into nothingness.
Even the rational consequences of a world without death have never been fully thought through.
It is not possible to foresee what people would be capable of believing as soon as they remove death from the world.
All of the dying are martyrs of a future world religion.
To think that you must still plead for death, as if it didn’t already overwhelmingly hold the upper hand! The ‘deepest’ spirits treat death like a card trick.
Knowledge can lose its deadliness only with the founding of a new religion that does not accept death.
Christianity is a step backwards from the beliefs of the ancient Egyptians. It admits the body decays and in imagining that decay makes the body contemptible. Embalming is the true glory of the deceased, so long as he is not revived.40
Ethnology, the study of ‘simple’ people, is the most melancholy of all sciences. How painfully and precise, how rigorously, how strenuously have people held on to their ancient institutions and yet still died out.
The most monstrous of all sentences: someone died ‘at the right time’.
Is anyone too good to die? We cannot say. First the person would have to live longer.
The tears of joy the dead will shed over the first person who will no longer die.
I want death to be serious, I want death to be frightful, and feared most when only Nothingness is to be feared.
It would be even harder to die if you were told that you will remain, but are sworn to silence.
Once again, now for the second or third time, I have thought of death as my salvation. I fear that I may altogether change my view of it. Perhaps I will soon belong to those who praise it, to those who in their old age pray to it. Thus I wish to set down here once and for all that that second future phase of my life, should it come to pass, is not valid. I don’t want to become something I’ve never been in order to invalidate everything for which I stood. One should think of me as two people, one who is strong, the other weak, and to the voice of the strong one should listen, for the weak is of no help to anyone. I don’t want the words of an old man to erase those of the young man. Better that I break off somewhere in the middle. Better that I don’t live half so long.41
One can only stand the erudition of those who do not venerate death.
Death is silent about nothing.
The despair of heroes over the abolition of death.
The two general views of death:
Better to croak than to die.
Better to die than to croak.
Death is born of God and has gobbled up its Father.
Freedom hates death most of all, but love is a close second.
After he dies he would like to be turned into grains of sand. To him the stars are too vain and the sea too wet.
He senses that with every destroyed city a piece of his own life falls away.
