'O Friend Unseen, Unborn, Unknown'

Rabbi David Wolpe tells me Monday’s post reminds him of a poem, “To a Poet a Thousand Years Hence,” by a poet I knew only by name: James Elroy Flecker. “I've always been moved,” David said, “especially by the penultimate stanza”: 

“O friend unseen, unborn, unknown,

    Student of our sweet English tongue,

Read out my words at night, alone:

    I was a poet, I was young.”

 

Flecker (1884-1915) makes a gesture of solidarity with a future poet and expresses his own wish to be remembered – a very human mingling of emotions, especially for a man dead of tuberculosis at age thirty. Only since my brother’s death in August have I given much thought to my “legacy.” Of course, we’ll provide for our sons. Last year we prepared a new will, something we hadn’t done in twenty years. It was an interesting experience. You can think of it as turning life into commodities. Not being terribly covetous myself, it was an effort to think systematically about “asset distribution.” I have no faith in being remembered, nor does that seem important. What we can do is remember family, friends and the luminaries of the past, our personal Pantheon whom we never met in person. Flecker mentions “old Moeonides the blind” – that is, Homer.

 

Flecker’s mother was Jewish which reminded me of a mother and son in Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate. Individuals, not groups or nations, are always his focus. The novel’s most memorable scene begins with Sofya Osipovna Levinton being transported by train to a Nazi death camp. A doctor without children of her own, she befriends a little boy, David. On arrival at the camp, a German officer orders all doctors to step forward. Sofya Osipovna ignores the command and chooses to stay with David and the others, who are herded into a gas chamber. Grossman takes us inside to witness their deaths:

 

“This boy, with his slight, bird-like body, had left before her.

 

“‘I’ve become a mother,’ she thought.

 

“That was her last thought.

 

“Her heart, however, still had life in it: it contracted, ached and felt pity for all of you, both living and dead; Sofya Osipovna felt a wave of nausea. She pressed David, now a doll, to herself; she became dead, a doll.”

 

Grossman’s unexpected shift into the second-person, addressing us directly – “all of you” – always prompts a tear. We can never assure ourselves that we’ll be remembered. I can’t even recall my maternal grandfather’s face or voice. All, after all, is vanity. Dr. Johnson writes:

 

"It often happens that those who in their lives were applauded and admired, are laid at last in the ground without the common honour of a stone; because by those excellences with which many were delighted, none had been obliged, and, though they had many to celebrate, they had none to love them."