[lit-ideas] Re: heine & glory
- From: Eric Yost <mr.eric.yost@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sat, 08 Dec 2007 01:16:05 -0500
>>the hadesfahrt is a really very old motive
Good point, Joerg. We know Wilhelm Reich refuted Freud's death-instinct,
but traveling to Sheol or Hades is good for poets and Orphics.
Isn't the Hades Reise more concerned with that certain age, when we
realize we're all dead meat -- that we had better stand for some value
or redemption, else our lives were trivial? You and me in our coffins or
urns, a clod of trivial dust? Robert Burton to answer in a footnote?
After that first adult tooth goes, and we see the calcium stone, once an
integral part of your own being, rootless on a dentist's cold metal tray
... don't we have the sense that our lives must be redeemed or
authentic? Else we pass into shadow after answering Ulysses' questions,
Penelope busy at her loom.
Sure we can pass the buck to babies, or following the gloomy younger
Auden, allow out lives in headaches and in worry vaguely to leak away.
Sure we can allege that we live for those we love, to care for them, so
that they may not suffer much in this cruel world. Yet when we face the
ultimate wipe out, no matter how much we retard our corpse, isn't it
always the old Pennsylvania Dutch saying, "too soon old, too late smart"?
So think of a soldier who died at 20. He could have matured into a
mediocre codger, fretting his life away in some silly job, believing
that the point of life was to live longest, and end as a trivial urn.
Not that dead youth is profound or wrinkled age superficial; rather that
life with intense purpose is much better than life played out according
to game theory or caution. On that point, I'm sure we agree.
Eric
------------------------------------------------------------------
To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off,
digest on/off), visit www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html
Other related posts:
