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News & ArtsSaturday, October 3, 2009
Death Reading the Obits
Posted by Dan Savage on Sat, Oct 3, 2009 at 11:08 AM
Marek Edelman was a Polish Jew and just 20 years-old when the Germans invaded. He was confined in the Warsaw Ghetto, watched as the Nazi death machine reduced the ghetto's population from a high of 500,000 to 60,000, and then helped lead the Warsaw Uprising. A small number of lightly armed Jews—220 men and women—held off the Nazi army for three weeks. Edelman, who had been resident of the part of Warsaw that became the ghetto, was able to slip away with fifty other fighters after the uprising was put down. He stayed in Warsaw after the war, became a doctor, and would later be imprisoned—again—by the communists for his role in the Solidarity movement. He died last week at the improbable age of 90. Here's how he described his role as a doctor:
“God is trying to blow out the candle, and I’m quickly trying to shield the flame, taking advantage of his brief inattention,” he said. “To keep the flame flickering, even if only for a little while longer than he would wish.”
Which reminded me of this...
The human being is a machine. An automatic machine. It is composed of thousands of complex and delicate mechanisms, which perform their functions harmoniously and perfectly, in accordance with laws devised for their governance, and over which the man himself has no authority, no mastership, no control. For each one of these thousands of mechanisms the Creator has planned an enemy, whose office is to harass it, pester it, persecute it, damage it, afflict it with pains, and miseries, and ultimate destruction. Not one has been overlooked.... Disease! That is the main force, the diligent force, the devastating force! It attacks the infant the moment it is born; it furnishes it one malady after another: croup, measles, mumps, bowel troubles, teething pains, scarlet fever, and other childhood specialties. It chases the child into youth and furnishes it some specialties for that time of life. It chases the youth into maturity, maturity into age, age into the grave....
If science exterminates a disease which has been working for God, it is God that gets the credit, and all the pulpits break into grateful advertising-raptures and call attention to how good he is! Yes, he has done it. Perhaps he has waited a thousand years before doing it. That is nothing; the pulpit says he was thinking about it all the time.
1
Charles? Did you sneak into Dan's account?
But really, interesting, and more thought provoking without the usual overwrought analysis Charles brings to things such as this.
But really, interesting, and more thought provoking without the usual overwrought analysis Charles brings to things such as this.
4
A good point. The nuanced, prickly view of his deity and of living that the doc mustered after surviving 90 years as a Polish Jew seems like something Twain could get behind. A great contrast to the worst elements of yahoo-Christianity mocked so nicely by Twain in that passage.
To me the most striking passage from the obit describes how in 1976 the doc finally broke 30 years of silence: "he insisted that it was not more meaningful or heroic to die with a gun in one’s hands than to perish in apparent submission to an overwhelming and invincible evil."
Death--the only immortal who treats us all alike, whose pity and whose peace and whose refuge are for all--the soiled and the pure, the rich and the poor--the loved and the unloved.
- Twain (1909).
To me the most striking passage from the obit describes how in 1976 the doc finally broke 30 years of silence: "he insisted that it was not more meaningful or heroic to die with a gun in one’s hands than to perish in apparent submission to an overwhelming and invincible evil."
Death--the only immortal who treats us all alike, whose pity and whose peace and whose refuge are for all--the soiled and the pure, the rich and the poor--the loved and the unloved.
- Twain (1909).
7
What is it about the obits that is so fascinating? I don't think I read a single one until I was about 32 and now I read them semi-obsessively.
8
Well, yes. God want's us all dead. I'm reminded of a quote from "The Phaedo". (And I'm working from memory here.) "How do we know that death, which men fear most, isn't the best thing of all?"
11
If I had the power to re-animate one dead person, it would probably be Mark Twain, although I expect he would be pissed off in the extreme. Cloning would do no good; it was the long series of sorrows great and small that made him who he was. IIRC as a young riverboat pilot he blamed himself after his beloved younger brother followed him into the same trade and died of burns following a boiler explosion (Twain had debarked the same boat shortly beforehand, but returned to nurse his dying brother); three of his four children died before him--his only son in infancy, two daughters in young adulthood (one of meningitis and another after an epileptic seizure); another daughter more or less browbeat him into financing her (less-than-stellar) singing career (she died in the early 1960's and her daughter, Twain's only other descendant, died a childless alcoholic a few short years after her mother); he was often on the brink of bankruptcy due to bad investments; and his fretting/ranting/curmudgeonhood made his beloved wife so jittery they had to avoid each other in their own home to maintain their sanity.
12
So, Dr. Edelman didn't drug and rape any 13 y/o girls? Nobody else was going to drag Roman Polanski into this thread?
I really have been wondering why G-d hid the technology to detect tumors and such all these thousands of years. Oh, how he loves us so. Wait, I mean, we've been bad, and need to believe harder. Harder!
I really have been wondering why G-d hid the technology to detect tumors and such all these thousands of years. Oh, how he loves us so. Wait, I mean, we've been bad, and need to believe harder. Harder!
15
@12 and 13: If you insist upon believing in a God who "devised" everything that we know to be horrible--every single thing, separately, specifically--rather than set evolution in motion and then stand back to see whether we used our brains to recognize that WE weren't gods and accepted what came our way--then you deserve that god. I'm fairly sure Dr. Edelman would laugh at your concept, at least partly because it isn't a Jewish concept.
16
I am in tears after reading the section of Samuel Clemens's (Mark Twain's) autobiography that narrates his daughter Jean's death. As if in response to my cavalier wish @11 to bring him back so I could have the pleasure of seeing him in person, he writes about Jean:
The rest of the chapter relates enough of events before and after to give a sense of how some level of contentment and peace had approached but remained just out of reach in the final months of Clemens's life.
Would I bring her back to life if I could do it? I would not. If a word would do it, I would beg for strength to withhold the word. And I would have the strength; I am sure of it. In her loss I am almost bankrupt, and my life is a bitterness, but I am content: for she has been enriched with the most precious of all gifts--that gift which makes all other gifts mean and poor-- death. I have never wanted any released friend of mine restored to life since I reached manhood...
The rest of the chapter relates enough of events before and after to give a sense of how some level of contentment and peace had approached but remained just out of reach in the final months of Clemens's life.
18
I see a parallel between Dan's war with religion and the skeptics of global warming. Both let their zeal push them into increasingly self-defeating positions.
With the global warming skeptics, you start to feel like they're not just defending their suvs and fighting carbon taxes, but that they're actively in global warming's camp, as if they're hoping the planet will keep warming.
With dan, I get why he'd be opposed to religion. Relogion's never been friendly to hosexuals, but more and more, it seems like he's opposed to any notion of faith or god.
Does he actually hope the universe is just a violent chaos where things are created and destpryed at random, including us and our inconvenient consciousnesses?
That might be what the universe is, but dan doesn't know. None of us does. And why would any of us hope it to be true?
Great sex advice columnist; horrible excuse for a theologian/philosoher.
With the global warming skeptics, you start to feel like they're not just defending their suvs and fighting carbon taxes, but that they're actively in global warming's camp, as if they're hoping the planet will keep warming.
With dan, I get why he'd be opposed to religion. Relogion's never been friendly to hosexuals, but more and more, it seems like he's opposed to any notion of faith or god.
Does he actually hope the universe is just a violent chaos where things are created and destpryed at random, including us and our inconvenient consciousnesses?
That might be what the universe is, but dan doesn't know. None of us does. And why would any of us hope it to be true?
Great sex advice columnist; horrible excuse for a theologian/philosoher.
19
@18. Neither does believing in god, nor a higher being, nor a life force, nor does vehemently ranting against those things mean you wish for suffering of any kind. It doesn't mean you believe the universe is inherently violent either. Actually it means none of the things you implied. One could not believe in all sorts of things and still believe the universe is awesome.
Read Dan a little more, he hopes for lots of love, sex and happiness. Quite a day dreamer that Dan Savage; one might even say he has his head in the clouds like some damn philosopher. Dan, Keep chasing that rainbow. @18, try thinking.
Read Dan a little more, he hopes for lots of love, sex and happiness. Quite a day dreamer that Dan Savage; one might even say he has his head in the clouds like some damn philosopher. Dan, Keep chasing that rainbow. @18, try thinking.
21
Faith by definition means not thinking about something and just believing it's true or false. Once it is shown to be true or false, it no longer requires faith.
Why people want to think in such a way eludes me.
Theater which is nothing more than fake reality wouldn't work without faith though....
Why people want to think in such a way eludes me.
Theater which is nothing more than fake reality wouldn't work without faith though....
23
@20, if you click on the link, you will find the attribution. And he says the obit "reminds him of" this passage, so it's obviously not his work, even if you don't find the link.
Not plagiarism.
Not plagiarism.
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