In praise of a writer
Giorgio Agamben, Quodlibet, April 20, 2023
On May 30, 1939, a man was buried in Thiais Cemetery in Paris, whose funeral was blessed by a Catholic priest, although he had never been baptised. He was Jewish, but his Jewish friends declined to recite Kaddish. He was probably dead of delirium tremens, but physicians diagnosed syncope. He was a citizen of the Austrian Republic, but he declared himself a subject of the Habsburgs.
This man — one of the greatest writers of the 20th century — was named Joseph Roth. He was only forty-five, but he thought that death would come too late anyway. He said no one was behind him — neither a people nor a state. Only the language in which he wrote — but even this is not certain, if some could be induced to hear in his German the voice of the Yiddish and the breath of Russian. And yet, perhaps, nobody like him had seen with such lucidity the ruin of the world surrounding him or described with such unprecedented vividness and joyful precision the streets, cafes, hotels of the cities where he happened to live. Perhaps no one had been so insolently happy in all that he was losing — that he had already irrevocably lost.
For this reason, no twentieth-century writer is closer to us than he. We too cannot believe ourselves to be citizens of the state where we have to live. We have been baptised, but we do not belong in any wise to the church. Like him, we have no longer anything behind us — not a people, much less a nation. But this does not deprive us of the ability to be happy and to try to write and speak cheerfully in a language which we refuse to identify with the inane rant that the media and schools never tire of propagating and disheartening. Without believing in any of the values and laws that are imposed on us, we have like him kept pure and intact our faith in the grass, in the starry sky, in the silence and in the beauty of faces.
Giorgio Agamben, Quodlibet, April 20, 2023
On May 30, 1939, a man was buried in Thiais Cemetery in Paris, whose funeral was blessed by a Catholic priest, although he had never been baptised. He was Jewish, but his Jewish friends declined to recite Kaddish. He was probably dead of delirium tremens, but physicians diagnosed syncope. He was a citizen of the Austrian Republic, but he declared himself a subject of the Habsburgs.
This man — one of the greatest writers of the 20th century — was named Joseph Roth. He was only forty-five, but he thought that death would come too late anyway. He said no one was behind him — neither a people nor a state. Only the language in which he wrote — but even this is not certain, if some could be induced to hear in his German the voice of the Yiddish and the breath of Russian. And yet, perhaps, nobody like him had seen with such lucidity the ruin of the world surrounding him or described with such unprecedented vividness and joyful precision the streets, cafes, hotels of the cities where he happened to live. Perhaps no one had been so insolently happy in all that he was losing — that he had already irrevocably lost.
For this reason, no twentieth-century writer is closer to us than he. We too cannot believe ourselves to be citizens of the state where we have to live. We have been baptised, but we do not belong in any wise to the church. Like him, we have no longer anything behind us — not a people, much less a nation. But this does not deprive us of the ability to be happy and to try to write and speak cheerfully in a language which we refuse to identify with the inane rant that the media and schools never tire of propagating and disheartening. Without believing in any of the values and laws that are imposed on us, we have like him kept pure and intact our faith in the grass, in the starry sky, in the silence and in the beauty of faces.
(English translation by I, Robot)
Pavel Nikolayevich Filonov, Faces, 1940. Courtesy of WikiArt.
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