`Absolute and Without Memorial'

The deaths of strangers, especially as we grow older and approach the inevitable, sometimes move us disproportionately. Samuel Beckett’s did that to me, and so, oddly, did Thelonious Monk’s and Joe Strummer’s. In each case the world seemed smaller and less habitable. Their absences pressed more heavily than many a presence. My oldest son reminded me yesterday that John Coltrane, had he lived, would be celebrating his 80th birthday on Sept. 23. The thought gives me vertigo. Admittedly, these people were strangers only in the sense that I never met them in person. Their work I knew well, over many years, and that may constitute the preferred way to know many people. And so, unexpectedly, I have been unable to stop thinking about Oriana Fallaci since she died on Friday.

Victor Davis Hanson, a good writer but hardly a political soulmate, has written movingly of her death: “I wish she were still alive to scoff at the politically correct, the appeaser, and the triangulator, but alas she is gone, defiant to the last.” And then I thought of lines from a poem by Wallace Stevens with, in this context, an appropriate title, “The Death of a Soldier”:

“Death is absolute and without memorial
As in a season of autumn
When the wind stops,

“When the wind stops and, over the heavens,
The clouds go, nevertheless,
In their direction.”

And reflect on this from “Technology and Poetry,” an essay by J.V. Cunningham:

“Consider the social act of death. This has so changed in my lifetime that any competent anthropologist would be forced to conclude that a whole society had been destroyed and replaced by invaders. Death is no longer ritualized. Men no longer train themselves to die a good death. We have no Ars Bene Moriendi. And when did you last see the black armband, the purple wreath? Formal mourning is out of style.”