I laid me down and slept; I awaked; for the Lord sustained me.
Perhaps you're like my wife and do not like to talk about death. If so, this letter may not be for you. As God stands outside His creation, a writer stands outside his subcreation. And so as I stand outside this letter, I realize it might be a little heavy. ("Why are things so heavy in the future? Is there something wrong with the earth's gravitational pull?")
I don't mean it to be. In my edits, I've tried to lighten up a bit. But it's hard to be light and talk about (spoiler alert) the Holocaust. Nevertheless, when one traverses life's woods with all its burrs, or even life's jungles with its venemous and man-eating animals, one should remember the milk, the honey, and the companionship of life. Remember – remember is a rather important word.
Memento mori means 'remember death' or 'remember you (can/will) die'. But why remember? Just to dwell or lament? I don't purely lament even when I remember the death of family, even the sudden death of friends. Why would I only lament when I think upon my own death?
Even in death there is good, if only the good of savoring that milk, appreciating that honey, and basking in that companionship.
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The Courtyard
I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know about the Holocaust. It feels like the information came pre-loaded. I do remember moments I learnt specific details. I remember vividly learning how bad it was in the Balkan States, and I remember learning how Fascist Italy remained a bulwark of relative safety before the Nazi invasion. (And yes, ‘relative’ is doing a lot of work there.)
I don’t remember when I learnt my family had been caught up and exterminated. It’s likely no one ever told me. I knew Eastern European Jewry had been almost wholly destroyed, especially throughout Poland; I knew my family were Jews from Eastern Europe, most living in Poland. I drew the obvious conclusions.
Looking back I wish I had asked my grandfather more questions (any questions). Already an adult at the start of the war, he spent all of the American participation in it assigned to the Navy Air Corp in Europe. His father had bee born in a small town Southeast of Vilna (Vilnius). There must have been something he could have told me.
My grandmother doesn’t remember anything. Now ninety-six, she was not yet thirteen when the war started. And her parents had come over (from Germany) earlier than my grandfather's. Maybe they were very much like her and didn’t pay attention to such things, didn’t keep in close touch with those whom they’d left, and so maybe she really doesn't (and maybe they really didn't) know anything. Or maybe the memory is so searing no one talked about it and she feigns ignorance to this day.
I had a great-aunt who wouldn’t even fly over Germany. She’d take three flights – Paris-London, London-Stockholm, Stockholm-Vilnius – to avoid its airspace. From a cousin (my Dad’s age), I feel some hostility to Germany, but she also has the ecumenacism and equinimity to realize genocide is a human problem. And yet another Aunt (same age as the cousin, more or less) adores Germany and has spent a great deal of time there.
I’ve met Austrians and Germans with complacency. I once had an Austrian tell me that he was a pacifist (with an air I now recognize from when my daughter tells me she’s used the potty). I once had a three-hour conversation over pizza and wine about The War and the Holocaust with a German woman and a Polish Lady. We noted at the time how strange it was; ‘A Pole, a German, and Jew walk into a bar…’.
Some of these difference are in temperament. Some of them are probably in our upbringing. I remember honoring the fidelity and courage of a Japanese soldier who stayed in the Philippines, fighting a war that had been over for thirty years until the Japanese government found his old commander and flew him out into the jungle to convince the lost boy (now over fifty) that the Japanese had surrendered and the war was truly over. A Chinese friend of mine could not abide my honoring of him, and explained (in perhaps too graphic detail for Facebook) why no Japanese ought ever be honored.
He brought up the Holocaust. Rightly and not exactly unkindly, he wondered if I would feel the same about this loyal soldier if he had been loyal to Hitler. That does feel different, doesn't it? At least it does to me.
Now, at the time my answer was ‘yes’, and I honored the several British and German soldiers and pilots who kept in contact with men they’d fought against whose identities they’d somehow learnt (probably when one or the other had been POWs). Now I’m less sure about that answer, though I still feel Japan is fundamentally different. My major justification for this felt difference is that these United States did not drop two nuclear bombs on Germany.
If my daughters ever run into a Pole or a German, I doubt they will think immediately of the Holocaust as I do. I don't expect they will wonder, as I always do, 'what did your relatives do during thew war; did they ever meet mine?'.
And I wonder when I travel North or East of the Alps if I will be able to visit a museum, eat at a restaurant, or walk through a castle without feeling death keeping pace with me. Memento mori – remember death, the practice of Socrates, the Stoics, Ecclesiastes, and me (apparently).
In some ways, I hope my daughters don’t feel death’s pall. In other ways, to remember is everything. God remembered Jonah in the whale. God remembered his people in Egypt. Catholics (I almost said ‘we’ there – I’m slowing associating myself with our family’s parish) regularly pray to God to remember us. I was (as almost all Jews are) raised to remember.
I don’t have a pithy ending so I’ll pilfer one from a favorite author. In a context wholly divergent from this one, that late, great biographer David McCullough said (and this is not a direct quotation), ‘We study History to remember.’ So let’s.
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Flowerbeds
Most of us I’d wager know the story that in a Roman Triumph, a public slave would stand behind the triumphal general or Caesar and whisper into his ear some version of, ‘Remember that thou art mortal’. Tertullian claimed that during his lifetime, the slave would say “Respice post te. Hominem te memento” (‘look behind you [to your death]. Remember you’re [a mortal] man.’), though no other contemporary author confirms this.
The triumph is not the beginning of memento mori; memento mori may be the beginning of philosophy though. In Plato’s Phaedo (the death of Socrates), Socrates says, “those who engage properly in philosophy are themselves in pursuit of nothing except dying and being dead.” And that strikes me as quite similar to David's psalms, given the geographic and temporal chasm between them: “So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.” (90:12).
Back at the beginning of the year, I wrote about what separates man from the animals. I said we were subcreators, could partake in God’s creation and not simply live in it. But another distinction I’ve heard is that we are the only animals who know we will die. And I’ve heard animals elevated near to us by science popularizers because they honor (the word they use is ‘mourn’) their dead.
As far as I know, there is not a single culture without some death ritual. Often our only real information about a culture comes from the grave goods they leave behind. The Egyptians had their Pyramids, the English had their howes (which may or may not have anything to do with death, but to which I was introduced in The Chronicles of Narnia as the marker of Aslan’s death). Buddhists try to free themselves from attachment to meet death, though that may simply be a bland Western interpretation of what’s actually going on. And we could go on for books bouncing from one continent to a different century to yet another culture, from Hindu cremation rituals to the sacrifices in the Aztec Empire and beyond.
In the West, we have an artistic marker we call the ‘memento mori’, a (usually) pictographic representation of the mortality of man’s life and his doings. Remember, Caesar, thou art mortal. Usually the representation is a skull, sometime accompanied with bones. Less often it’s an hourglass, wilting flowers, or a coffin. Perhaps the most famous incarnation of the memento mori in literature comes from Hamlet.
“Alas, poor
Yorick! I knew him, Horatio—a fellow of infinite
jest, of most excellent fancy. He hath bore me on his
back a thousand times, and now how abhorred in
my imagination it is! My gorge rises at it. Here hung
those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft.
Where be your gibes now? your gambols? your
songs? your flashes of merriment that were wont to
set the table on a roar? Not one now to mock your
own grinning? Quite chapfallen? Now get you to my
lady’s chamber, and tell her, let her paint an inch
thick, to this favor she must come. Make her laugh
at that.”
(5.1.190)
Most people know memento mori through the vanitas, a work of art with the theme of death. This is the skeleton with a crow and a rotten apple, all with unfurled wings above which says ‘memento mori’ or ‘vita mortalium vigilia’. There’s also the even-more-on-the-nose apparition of the Grim Reaper, cloak and scythe and all.
But the memento mori is more common than the vanitas, found mostly within other pieces, that is in a work not otherwise about death. The tiny image is the worm in the apple, the little reminder that (to be cynical) all our endeavors come undone in the end. These can show up anywhere, from the portrait of a man to a painting of a wedding feast. “Poor Yorick, I knew him well Horatio” is a memento mori within a play, as is much of George Washington’s lyrics in Hamilton (“I was just like you when I was younger/Head full of fantasies of dying like a martyr… Dying is easy young man, living is harder.”).
But as we are now walking the Flowerbeds, let’s take a look at some beauti… eh… impressive examples of memento mori.
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Memento Mori, Jacques Jonghelinck, 1571
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Pendant with a Monk and Death, Anon (Belgan), circa 1625
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Renaissance Gimmel Ring with Memento Mori, Anon (German), 1631
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Templum Riddarholmianum Holmiense cum exequiarum justa Carolo XI (The Riddarholmian Temple of Holmiense with the funeral procession of [Swedish King] Charles XI) , Sébastien Leclerc, 1697
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The Ambassadors, Hans Holbein the Younger, 1533
(Yes, that skull is part of the original painting and not a photoshopped ad-on.)
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Transi de René de Chalon (René de Chalon's Cold Wind), Ligier Richier, circa 1546
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Young Man with a Skull, Frans Hals, circa 1626
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Hortus Proprius
Syllepsis (sil-LEP-sis), or conceptio, double supply, or change in concord.
Syllepsis is very easy to confuse with zeugma. In fact, if you allow me to return to my teenage years and once again think about the SAT, a syllepsis is to the zeugma as a square is to a rectangle. Simply, both syllepsis and zeugma use one word to cover two or more phrases or clauses. The difference is that in syllepsis the controlling word must be understood differently with respect to the words or phrases it governs.
Does that make any sense? We have a handy poem about it, from Epsy.
“Oh, Zeugma’s dear, Syllepsis too,
And each to t’other twin;
And with the both of them, my sweets,
It’s love, it’s love I’m in.
To zeugma but an hour ago I offered up my heart—
Or else it was Syllepsis, for I can’t tell them apart.
How can I find solace in a lovely lover’s spat
Unless I have a way to know which one I’m angry at?
‘You lost your coat and temper,’ says Syllepsis of our tiff.
‘You left in fury and a Ford,’ says Zeugma. What’s the diff?”
If that still is less than clear (and I wouldn't blame you in the slightest if it were), let’s quote from a more modern source. Forsyth writes:
“There is an old (and doubtless untrue) story of a young journalist who was criticised by his editor for not being brief enough. His articles, he was told, had Too Many Words. The next day, he filed this report:
‘A shocking affair occured last night. Sir Edward Hopeless, as guest at Lady Panmore’s ball, complained of feeling ill, took a highball, his hat, his coat, his departure, no notice of his friends, a taxi, a pistol from his pocket, and finally his life. Nice chap. Regrets and all that.’”
Where in zeugma, we had the Wilderian witticism, “The good end happily and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means.” With syllepsis, we have the witticism from Dorothy Parker, “I’ve barely enough room to lay my hat and a few friends.”
“In his lectures, he leaned heavily on his desk and stale jokes.” (Epsy)
“You held your breath and the door for me.” (Alanis Morissette)
“Mr. Pickwick took his hat and his leave.” (Pickwick Papers)
As zeugma works, so too syllepsis (that's a zeugma). Syllepsis is harder to achieve and on the ear (and that’s a syllepsis). Syllepsis is thus both more effective and harder to keep up for any length without it sounding too try-hard. Their affect is also different; as I wrote in my essay on zeugma, that Figure is often forgettable, English ears and mouths struggle to frame it well, and we often end up adding the missing words back in in our forgetfulness. This is not true with syllepsis, because of just how striking and disjointed the verb choice sounds.
Thank you
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A Bench Under the Trees
“Lying to Ourselves” by Theodore Dalrymple
The article starts:
“One of the peculiarities of our age is the ferocity with which intellectuals and politicians defend propositions that they do not—because they cannot—believe to be true, so outrageous are they, such violence do they do to the most obvious and evident truth. Agatha Christie (a far greater psychologist than Sigmund Freud), drew attention almost a century ago to the phenomenon when she had Dr. Sheppard, the protagonist and culprit of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd say, ‘It is odd how, when you have a secret belief of your own which you do not wish to acknowledge, the voicing of it by someone else will rouse you to a fury of denial. I burst immediately into indignant speech.’”
And it just gets better from there. As all totalitarian regimes rest on and survive by lies, it is vital to allow everyone (even nutjobs) to speak what they think is truth. Though hate speech is real, this is the problem with hate speech laws. Though blasphemy is real (and dangerous), this is the problem with problem with blasphemy laws.
Come on in and read.
“Give Me My Nightly Rest” by Abigail Dunlap
Our younger is about ten months old and she has never once slept through the night. Until early this month, she wouldn’t sleep two hours in a row. Before she finally started sleeping in three-, four-, and even once in a five-hour stretch, we’ve slept through her cries. We’ve slept through her cries even though her monitor was right beside us and turned up. We've slept through her cries even though she was right beside us.
On top of this, we’ve had a series of bad bugs and hospital runs. We’ve suffered our elder daughter’s seizure and her subsequent unexplained fevers. We’ve had family sickness and family death. And so I barely kept it together when, after two weeks of illness and living on about twenty hours of sleep in a week of nights, I read Mrs. Dunlap write:
“The past nine months have been laden with grief. Repairs to a new-to-us minivan have equaled the amount we paid for it. My nearly three-year-old slipped through an accidentally unlatched backyard gate resulting in a CPS visit that undermined my parental confidence. A favorite teenage cousin drowned on a family fishing trip. Our beloved cat experienced a neurological event, then rallied before dying on her own terms a week before Christmas. A dear friend received a shocking diagnosis of twelve brain tumors and almost immediately entered hospice.
Against this backdrop, how can God expect me to parent while shouldering this weight of grief on such little sleep? He knows how frail we are. The Psalmist extolls that he gives his beloved rest.
Am I not beloved?”
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The Hammock
Unearthed by Meryl Frank
From the get-go, let me say that Meryl is my cousin. Hackett recently published her book about our family in the Holocaust, I wanted to share it all with you, and, because these are my letters, I get to do just that.
Our Aunt Mollie gave Meryl (Ambassador Frank to you) a job before I was born: be the memorial candle of our family. She also gave her a book, a book she was not allowed to read. Meryl’s book is the story of that book, our family in general, and especially a great cousin of ours called Franya Winter who was a star of Vilna’s Yiddish Theatre.
In Unearthed, Meryl catalogues thirty years of research, spanning four continents and several coincidences I can only call miraculous. I could perhaps maybe be partial, but it’s a great little history wrapped up in a family tragedy which was also a world tragedy. And all that despite disagreeing mightily with the politics of some of her asides. But that’s okay, because the next time I’m over for Shabbot or Passover, we’ll argue about it. We’re still alive to argue about it.
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Reviso the Courtyard et Peroratio
Why do we never mean ‘never again’? A friend of mine suffered through a genocide in the 90s. China is murdering the Uyghurs while salting their metaphorical soil and bulldozing their literal land. I recently read about Indian Christians chased from their homes. Meryl records someone in her book as saying ‘I can’t believe that happened’. I like her response: It’s happening still.
Why do we let it?
I don’t know. Perhaps because we are limited creatures. Having made a vow not to tackle questions beyond my pay grade, I shouldn’t tackle this one. But the question is worth attending to. Martin Amis just died. He got his start (perhaps) because of his famous author father, but he arguably made his name with several Holocaust books (as one reviewer commented, “Damn, that fool can write”). When talking about the Holocaust, Amis said,‘If you think too much about it, you start wondering if it’s a waste of time to think about anything else.’
So what's the lesson? As long as men walk the earth (or travel space), they will debate that question. I imagine there's no one meaning, and I'm reminded of a Jewish wedding tradition. Traditionally, the groom breaks a glass after the couple has married. Traditionally, this is understood as 'even in the midst of happiness, there is some pain'. Meryl says something else, 'At least it's not a leg.'
Memento mori.
As always, please share this newsletter with anyone whom you think might like it. If you’ve come here without being a Scriptor, click HERE to sign up for the newsletter. If you’d like to read the back catalogue, click HERE. And if you’d like to share your thoughts with me, please do so. You can reach me below: on Twitter, through my website, or by email. You’d also be doing me a favor if you shared this edition of Hortus Scriptorius on any social media available to you.
Until next we meet, I remain your fellow
Scriptor horti scriptorii,
Judd Baroff
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