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Supporting the proposition that one may as well take in as much life as one can on the grounds that death and nothingness will come soon enough, Mr. Alvarez reaches movingly into the experience of the Russian concentration camps in finding the affirmation for life.
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“Life is a gift that nobody should renounce,” the great Russian poet Osip Mandelstam said to his wife when, in exile after his imprisonment, she proposed that they commit suicide together if Stalin’s secret police took them again.
Mandelstam was, in fact, rearrested and died in a forced-labor camp somewhere in Siberia. Yet right up to the end he refused his wife’s alternatives: “Whenever I talked of suicide, M. used to say: ‘Why hurry? The end is the same everywhere, and here they hasten it for you.’ Death was so much more real, and so much simpler than life, that we all involuntarily tried to prolong our earthly existence, even if only for a brief moment - just in case the next day brought some relief! In war, in the camps and during periods of terror, people think much less about death (let alone about suicide) than when they are living normal lives. Whenever at some point on earth, mortal terror and the pressure of utterly insoluble problems are present in a particularly intense form, general questions about the nature of being recede into the background. How could we stand in awe before the forces of nature and the eternal laws of existence if terror of a mundane kind was felt so tangibly in everyday life? In a strange way, despite the horror of it, this also gave a certain richness to our lives. Who knows what happiness is? Perhaps it is better to talk in more concrete terms of the fullness or intensity of existence, and in this sense there may have been something more deeply satisfying in our desperate clinging to life than in what people generally strive for.”
-- A. Alvarez, “The Savage God”
_ _ _
“Life is a gift that nobody should renounce,” the great Russian poet Osip Mandelstam said to his wife when, in exile after his imprisonment, she proposed that they commit suicide together if Stalin’s secret police took them again.
Mandelstam was, in fact, rearrested and died in a forced-labor camp somewhere in Siberia. Yet right up to the end he refused his wife’s alternatives: “Whenever I talked of suicide, M. used to say: ‘Why hurry? The end is the same everywhere, and here they hasten it for you.’ Death was so much more real, and so much simpler than life, that we all involuntarily tried to prolong our earthly existence, even if only for a brief moment - just in case the next day brought some relief! In war, in the camps and during periods of terror, people think much less about death (let alone about suicide) than when they are living normal lives. Whenever at some point on earth, mortal terror and the pressure of utterly insoluble problems are present in a particularly intense form, general questions about the nature of being recede into the background. How could we stand in awe before the forces of nature and the eternal laws of existence if terror of a mundane kind was felt so tangibly in everyday life? In a strange way, despite the horror of it, this also gave a certain richness to our lives. Who knows what happiness is? Perhaps it is better to talk in more concrete terms of the fullness or intensity of existence, and in this sense there may have been something more deeply satisfying in our desperate clinging to life than in what people generally strive for.”
-- A. Alvarez, “The Savage God”
