Let's dig up that little green stick

On the road to nowhere

Leo Tolstoy, the great Russian novelist (War and Peace), died on this day in 1910. Near the end of his life he wrote:

"The meaningless absurdity of life is the only incontestable knowledge accessible to man."

In his later masterpiece, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Tolstoy tells the harrowing story of the slow, and then rapid, decline of Ivan Ilyich, a judge who has never before given death a second thought. Ilyich the materialist, forced to confront the stark truth of his inevitable passing, turns metaphysical: Will his death be his destruction?

"Death is over; there is no more death," are Ivan Ilyich's last words.

Tolstoy himself, as he neared death, resolved to find a more spiritual life on earth – at the age of 82, he ran away from home. He contracted a chill on the train, forcing him to disembark at a station along the way. The chill turned to pneumonia, and he died in the stationmaster's room, surrounded by journalists, who recorded his last words:  "But the peasants – how do they die?"

As he had requested, Tolstoy was buried on his estate, at a spot where his brother once claimed to have buried a little green stick on which was written the secret of universal love and understanding.

Read Ivan Ilyich's story:

The mouse that roared

Mickey Mouse was born on this day in 1928. He starred in Steamboat Willie, an 8-minute animated short.

Walt Disney wanted to call his creation Mortimer Mouse, but his wife didn't like the name and suggested Mickey.

Disney died Dec. 15, 1966, of complications from lung cancer. It was rumored that his body had been cryogenically frozen, and, alternately, that he was buried somewhere on the grounds of Disneyland. Actually, he was cremated and his ashes interred at Forest Lawn Cemetery. His death was not publicly announced until after his funeral, which was attended only by close family members. He left the bulk of his estate to his wife, Lillian.

It is Hollywood legend – and we'll go with it – that from his deathbed in St. Joseph's Hospital in Burbank, across the street from Disney Studios, Disney's last words were about how shabby the studio's water tower looked. The tower is adorned with the image of Mickey Mouse. Studio executives have made sure the tower is repainted every year.

Walt Disney once said: "I love Mickey Mouse more than any woman I've ever known."

Love Mickey too? Then splurge a little:

What does a cold beer feel like?

Marcel Proust, French novelist, died on this day in 1922.

"Do not the indiscretions which occur only after a person's life on earth is ended," Proust wrote in Remembrance of Things Past, "prove that nobody really believes in a future life?

"If these indiscretions are true, we ought to fear the resentment of her whose actions we are revealing fully as much as on the day when we shall meet her in heaven, as we feared it so long as she was alive, when we felt ourselves bound to keep her secret.

"And if these indiscretions are false, invented because she is no longer present to contradict them, we ought to be even more afraid of the dead woman's wrath if we believed in heaven. But no one does believe in it."

Proust's last words were: "I feel like a cold beer."

Forget about Proust--you'll never finish him.  Remember to read this:

A boy's best friend is his mother

Ed Gein killed his final victim on this day in 1957.

Ed Gein is the most famous son of Plainfield, Wisconsin.

Gein lived on a 160-acre farm with his brother, Henry, and a domineering mother. Henry died in 1944 under mysterious circumstances, and his mother passed away the next year. Ed was 39, unmarried, and in need of a hobby. He began to dig up female corpses by night in remote cemeteries. He dissected these, keeping some heads, sex organs, livers, hearts and intestines. He would flay the skin from the body and wear it himself, dancing and cavorting around the house. (He kept his mom's bedroom locked and undisturbed, and also sealed off the drawing room and five more upstairs rooms.)

Deciding he needed some newer clothes, he began making his own corpses. 54-year old Mary Hogan disappeared from the tavern she ran in December 1954. Bernice Worden, who ran the local hardware store, disappeared on this day in 1957. Mrs. Worden's son, Frank, a sheriff's deputy, learned that Eddie Gein had been seen in town on the day of his mother's disappearance, so he and the sheriff went out to the old Gein place, already known by local kids as a haunted house.

Sound familiar? Gein was the inspiration for Norman Bates, the deranged mama's boy in Hitchcock's Psycho and Robert Bloch's novel of the same name, and the serial killer in Silence of the Lambs was based on him.

In a woodshed on the farm, the men found the naked, headless body of Worden's mother hanging upside down from a meat hook and slit open down the front. Her head and intestines were discovered in a box, and her heart on a plate in the dining room. The skins from ten human heads were found preserved, and another skin taken from the upper torso of a woman was rolled up on the floor. There was a belt fashioned from carved-off nipples, a chair upholstered in human skin, lampshades covered in flesh pilled taut, a table propped up by a human shinbones, and a refrigerator full of human organs.
The four posts on Gein's bed were topped with skulls and a human head hung on the wall alongside nine death masks - the skinned faces of women - and decorative bracelets made out of human skin. There were soup bowls fashioned from skulls, a shoebox full of female genitalia, faces stuffed with newspapers and mounted like hunting trophies on the walls, and a vest flayed from the torso of a woman. Gein later confessed that he enjoyed dressing himself in skin-garments and pretending he was his mother. The remains of 15 bodies were found; Gein couldn't recall how many murders he'd committed.

After ten years in a mental hospital, Gein was judged competent to stand trial. He was found guilty but criminally insane. He spent the rest of his life in insane asylums, and died in a geriatric ward in 1984, aged 77, always, it was said, a model prisoner - gentle, polite and discreet.

His gravesite in the Plainfield cemetery was frequently vandalized over the years; souvenir seekers would chip off pieces of his gravestone before it was stolen in 2000. It was recovered in 2001 and is presently displayed in a Wautoma, Wisconsin museum.

In the last interview Gein gave, he said: "I like this place, everybody treats me nice. Some of them are a little crazy, though."

Read more about kooky Ed Gein:

Bring me a bottle, and let me die

Desiderius Erasmus, Dutch Renaissance theologian and writer, died on this day in 1536. He was the first to say:

"Women -- can't live with them, can't live without them."

Erasmus wrote:  "The nearer people approach old age the closer they return to a semblance of childhood, until the time comes for them to depart this life, again like children, neither tired of living no aware of death."

Read H. L. Mencken in defense of women, and some other hobby-horses:

That'll do it, every time

This is the date of death of American writer Willa Cather (1873-1947). The author of Death Comes for the Archbishop, she said:

"I shall not die of a cold. I shall die of having lived."

Check it out:

God bless Herman Melville

Moby-Dick was published on this day in 1851. The author, Herman Melville, had a nervous breakdown four years later, in part because of his novel's dismal sales. After unsuccessful lecture tours, Melville found work as a customs inspector on the New York City docks. His oldest son committed suicide in 1867.

Melville's death on September 28, 1891, in New York, was noted with only one obituary notice. Moby-Dick sold only 3,000 copies during his lifetime.

An unfinished work, Billy Budd, Foretopman, was unpublished until 1924. The protagonist of the story, set during the war between England and France, is the innocent and angelic Billy Budd, the favorite of everyone on the crew of the HMS Bellipotent except John Claggart, the sadistic master-at-arms. Claggart falsely accuses Billy of being involved in a mutiny. Billy, unable to answer the charge because of his stammer, accidentally kills Claggart.

The ship's captain, Vere, has seen through Claggart's plot but fears rebellion if Billy isn't punished. He calls a court, which condemns Billy, who goes cheerfully to his fate and is hanged from the yardarm, right after crying out "God bless Captain Vere." When Vere is mortally wounded during an engagement with the French, he murmurs as his last words Billy's name.

"Death is only a launching into the region of the strange Untried," Melville wrote in Moby-Dick; "it is but the first salutation to the possibilities of the immense Remote, the Wild, the Watery, the Unshored..."

Well, the buck did stop there

Harry S Truman was born on this day in 1884.

"My villain is a perfectly nice little man called Harry S (for nothing) Truman. He created the national security state. He institutionalized the Cold War. He placed us on a permanent wartime footing. He started that vast hemorrhaging of debt...


"Deliberately (he) set in train an imperial expansion that has cost the lives of many millions of people all over the world." -- Gore Vidal.

To read Truman's own modest take on the matter, see Today in The Cynic's Almanac

Belief on the back burner

Can you deny that there are supernatural beings and not be an atheist?

The New York Times ran the transcript of an interview conducted for “The Stone” by Gary Gutting, a professor of philosophy at Notre Dame, with Howard Wettstein, his counterpart at the University of California. Wettstein is a practicing Jew who prays regularly, and he is proof, I suppose, that one can have a rich religious life without necessarily believing in God – or, in his words, taking “a theoretical stance on God’s existence.” As Wettstein sees it (I think), belief is irrelevant to faith, and even irrelevant altogether. To paraphrase another philosopher with a similar name (Wittgenstein), what we can’t put into words we must pass over in silence.

Wettstein takes an unhelpful detour at the beginning, comparing theorizing about God to theorizing about numbers. “Even an advanced and creative mathematician,” he says, “need not have views about, say, the metaphysical status of numbers.” He cites the physicist Richard Feynman, who was supposed to have said about himself that he “lived among the numbers,” but who was unconcerned with whether they “actually” existed. But when we think about numbers we are able to describe how they work, in the form of proofs.  No such thinking can be done about God to yield results that are anything but highly subjective and abstract.

Wettstein talks about a rabbi friend of his who held that “God’s reality went without saying,” but that “God’s reality as a supernatural being was quite another thing.” (Wettstein’s words.) To watch his friend praying was to be overwhelmed, he says, by the intimacy of the pray-er and the pray-ee: “God was almost tangible.”

Gutting asks, quite reasonably, how one can pray to something that doesn’t exist. Wettstein says that “’existence’ is, pro or con, the wrong idea for God.”    

“My relation to God has come to be a pillar of my life, in prayer, in experience of the wonders and the awfulness of our world,” Wettstein says. “And concepts like the supernatural and transcendence have application here. But (speaking in a theoretical mode) I understand such terms as directing attention to the sublime rather than referring to some nonphysical domain. To see God as existing in such a domain is to speak as if he had substance, just not a natural or physical substance. As if he were composed of the stuff of spirit, as are, perhaps, human souls. Such talk is unintelligible to me. I don’t get it.”

In other words, we can’t talk about whether God exists, we can only talk about what His existence means to us. An argument like this gives sophistry a good name.

“So what is the real question?” Gutting asks, a little wearily it seems.

“The real question is one’s relation to God, the role God plays in one’s life, the character of one’s spiritual life,” Wettstein answers. These aren’t questions, they are sidestepping the question.

        

Death: DIY

My great idea is finally catching on, and as usual I don’t get any credit for it. Maybe because I kept it to myself. “Selfie obits” are now to die for, as reported in “USA Today.”

Writing your own obituary was a brainstorm that came to me six or seven years ago, when my former best friend died and no one had much to say at his funeral. My pal had been brilliant and creative and eloquent, as well as never shy about self-promotion, and a self-crafted obit would have been right down his alley. As it was, his family/friends could barely muster the resources to run even a small notice of his death in the newspaper.

Look what Grandma did!

It is just such cruel happenstances of fate that we can take arms against with an “auto-obituary.” Why leave it to someone else to sum up your life, even a loved one? Or particularly a loved one, who may be prostrate with grief, preoccupied with other details of your final disposition, or otherwise without the wherewithal to give you a proper written send-off?

To paraphrase Big Daddy in “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” most people don’t get in the paper until they die. When they do, it’s often, well, disappointing. One or two lines about the deceased, who more than likely never met a stranger, and the rest of the space given over to a listing of the survivors. Composing your own obituary just might reassure you that you’ll escape a fate worse than death: Irrelevance.

The “USA” article references Susan Soper of Atlanta, who offers the “Obitkit” as a guide to help people take control of their deaths, including writing their own obituaries. Just perusing her site, it seems to me there’s one major element lacking: Obitwit.

Since death can come at any time, it’s never too early to start working on your obit. (You can always update it, like your resume.) Give it enough thought and effort, and who knows, maybe you’ll help contribute to a whole new genre: Obitlit.