a little sermon for the grand story
Marjorie Perloff, a notable literary theorist, died Sunday.
The New York Times had a long, substantive obituary ready Monday.
Creepy.
I said to the reviewer, Clay Risen, via email, that his admirable narrative surely required “a bit of scrambling for information,” normal for NYT obituaries. Monolithic sculptor “Richard Serra died yesterday,” I added. “and Roberta Smith got a first version online the same day. It’s as if the obit was largely done before death, waiting in draft. ‘She’s dead. Amend, edit, upload'.”
Next?
Marjorie Perloff is another instance, for me, of a grand person who may have been forgotten years ago, then is brought back to mind by their death—yet,
to be soon forgotten again—which calls for thinking about what lives are generally.
For the most part, lives mean little beyond the joy of life itself, like most of life: never noted—which is true of countless beauties in nature (though flora aren’t enjoying life, just definitely flourishing): never seen.
A war veteran said to me, way back (quoting an old comic strip, I believe), "Life is strange, then you die." (I’ve heard that elsewhere. Is it trite?)
Next: a giant tomb for the unknown innocents killed by wars of aggression.
Meanwhile, the admired high achiever may gain their most public recognition, their greatest kudos, only when they can't appreciate it.
Generally among us, one trusts that, during life, living recognition is enough, and not widely public (if at all), not needing that.
Maybe the admirable obituary causes a large audience to turn to the deceased’s work for the first time. We certainly need exemplars and emulatable models. Will readers find flourishing orientation from the noted life?
What better reason for authentic, high cultural appeal in ordinary news, which is also reason enough for a rich presence of humanities in higher education
(so dominated by technological dreams).
Do obituaries remind readers that each life is worth cherishing, then honoring? (Notwithstanding the sorry thugs who disagree.)
At a level of artistic living, appreciating the singular life maybe drew Marjorie to marginalized literary artists not much known or forgotten—or “difficult, abstract, nontraditional writing,” notes the reviewer, for which she was their hermeneut, “manag[ing] to parse and explain [the art work] in clear, jargon-free books and essays for both academic and general-interest readers.”
She was an exemplar of my claim that teaching may be the essence of humanity.
She was a marginal theorist of a marginal mode of the humanities, in a world where Our humanity (in a moral sense) is too much on “the edge of irony” (title of her last book), which is commonplace for Our form of life.
Like you, dear Jacques, Marjorie “was an advocate of close reading, or the word-by-word, line-by-line examination of a text” (textual intimacy, I call it), though you weren’t “seeking beauty in literature.”
Anyway, the truth that each life is worth honoring keeps health care profes-
sionals devoted, those who see death daily—those who don't wilt away by the stress of so much avoidable death. Maybe more attention to medical humanities would contribute to burnout prevention in this world where health care profes-
sions become repair stations for cavalier and careless lives that expect to be saved from their chronic complacency.
Love this:
In the face of a seemingly limitless access to information, Professor Perloff called for an appreciation of what she called “unoriginal genius” — the use of other people’s words in new and surprising ways.That’s vindication for T.S. Eliot who quipped that great poets steal.
I hope that obituaries of wonderfully worthy persons cause everyone to want to make something lasting of their life. Aptly for her, Perloff ends the Acknow-
ledgements of Edge of Irony by quoting Wittgenstein: "The world of the happy is a happy world."
Children of the ordinary dead will remember them, of course (if there were children). The memories of friends and colleagues endure, prior to their deaths.
Maybe there will be something in an archive, a library, a museum.
At best, a life finds a place in effective history, beyond being the topic of careerist scholarship: being the creator of something which changes the world lastingly, like a life-saving drug or political nobility—but generally, and accessibly, parents and teachers change the world lastingly through concerted cultivation of children who grow to lead happy, productive lives.
Anyone can be worth honor in their world for that!
It's enough to have made a healthy difference among persons in one's life,
of course.
So many wonderful lives don't get any note of passing. But the aggregate of us makes humanity. As community is composed of singular lives, and democracy happens vote by vote, so progressive history is made by the devotion of those who participate in Our self-plotting Story, most usually unnoted.
Humanity is truly progressing, truly evolving, life by life. Thus, the inter-
generationality of Our evolving is the essence of humanity advanced by concerted cultivation.
That's it! Each of us is a point of telic light in Our ever-unfinished pointillism, generating Our open telos (changing direction across eras of Time). All lives are a note, a vote in Our endless story, mostly never written.
Give reason to live, to be well and to be well. Bring importance to life,
for others’ lives as well as for your own exemplarity: Give importance,
create importance.
