I was then so meek that now, when I’m tortured by remorse for not having loved him enough before he died, I always summon up that scene. To be sincere, I have to add that it was easy for me to submit to his arrangements because at that time I found the idea of being forced not to work rather attractive.
“What is a repetition? A repetition is the re-enactment of past experience toward the end of isolating the time segment which has lapsed in order that it, the lapsed time, can be savored of itself and without the usual adulteration of events that clog time like peanuts in brittle. Last week, for example, I experienced an accidental repetition. I picked up a German-language weekly in the library. In it I noticed an advertisement for Nivea Creme, showing a woman with a grainy face turned up to the sun. Then I remembered that twenty years ago I saw the same advertisement in a magazine on my father’s desk, the same woman, the same grainy face, the same Nivea Creme. The events of the intervening twenty years were neutralized, the thirty million deaths, the countless torturings, uprootings and wanderings to and fro. Nothing of consequence could have happened because Nivea Creme was exactly as it was before. There remained only time itself, like a yard of smooth peanut brittle.”
“The enduring is something which must be accounted for. One cannot simply shrug it off.”
Shaun Gallagher for The Institute of Art and Ideas.
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One evening he asked me: “Do you think everything stops when we’re dead?”
The mystery of death is something I think about every day, but I was not yet in a position to give him the information he was asking of me. To please him, I invented the happiest faith in our future.
“I believe pleasure survives, because sorrow is no longer necessary. Decomposition could recall sexual pleasure. Certainly it will be accompanied by happiness and repose, since recomposition would be so toilsome. Decomposition should be the reward of life!”
I was a total failure. We were at table after supper. Without answering, he rose from his chair, drained another glass, and said, “This is no moment for philosophizing – least of all, with you!”
I have discovered that most people have no one to talk to, no one, that is, who really wants to listen. When it does at last dawn on a man that you really want to hear about his business, the look that comes over his face is something to see. Do not misunderstand me. I am no do-gooding Jose Ferrer going around with a little whistle to make people happy. Such do-gooders do not really want to listen, are not really selfish like me; they are being nice fellows and boring themselves to death, and their listeners are not really cheered up. Show me a nice Jose cheering up an old lady and I’ll show you two people existing in despair. My mother often told me to be unselfish, but I have become suspicious of the advice. No, I do it for my own selfish reasons. If I did not talk to the theater owner or the ticket seller, I should be lost, cut loose metaphysically speaking. I should be seeing one copy of a film which might be shown anywhere and at any time. There is a danger of slipping clean out of space and time. It is possible to become a ghost and not know whether one is in downtown Loews in Denver or suburban Bijou in Jacksonville. So it was with me.
Brill, the preeminent Philonic studies publisher, has two new titles to this series in the pipeline: Philo of Alexandria: On the Contemplative Life and Philo of Alexandria: On the Life of Abraham.
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See lineup here.
