At that moment a gentleman who has joined the mourners out of curiosity, Senor Vivaldo, intervenes: he disputes the idea that burning the poetry truly answers to the dead man's wish, for a wish must make sense and this one does not. It would therefore be better to give his poetry to other people, that it might bring them pleasure, wisdom, experience. And without waiting for Ambrosios response, he bends down and takes a few of the pages nearest to him. Ambrosio says to him: "Out of courtesy, sir, I will permit you to keep those that you have taken; but it is futile to think that I will refrain from burning the rest."
"Out of courtesy, I will permit you"; meaning that even though a dead friends wish has for me the force of law, I am not a lackey to the laws, I respect them as a free being who is not blind to other values, values that may stand opposed to the law, such as, for instance, courtesy or the love of art. That is why "I will permit you to keep those that you have taken," while hoping that my friend will forgive me. Still, in making this exception I have violated his wish, which for me is law; I have done so on my own responsibility, at my own risk, and I've done so as a violation of a law, not
as a denial and nullification of it; that is why "it is futile to think that I will refrain from burning the rest.
16
A television broadcast: three famous and admired women collectively propose that women too should have the right to be buried in the Pantheon. It's important, they say, to consider the symbolic significance of this act. And they immediately suggest the names of some great dead women who, in their opinion, could be moved there.
A fair demand, certainly; yet something about it troubles me: these dead women who could be moved right over to the Pantheon, aren't they now lying beside their husbands? Certainly; and they wanted it so. What then are we to do with the husbands? Move them too? That would be hard; not being important enough, they must stay where they are, and the wives that have been moved out will spend their eternity in widows' solitude.
Then I say to myself: and what about the men already in the Pantheon? Yes, the men! Are they perchance in the Pantheon of their own will? It was after they died, without asking their opinion, and certainly contrary to their last wishes, that it was decided to turn them into symbols and separate them from their wives.
After Chopin's death, Polish patriots cut up his body to take out his heart. They nationalized this poor muscle and buried it in Poland.
A dead person is treated either as trash or as a symbol. Either way, it's the same disrespect to his vanished individuality.
17
Ah, it's so easy to disobey a dead person. If, nonetheless, we sometimes submit to his wishes, it is not out of fear, out of duress, but because we love him and refuse to believe him dead. If an old peasant on his deathbed begs his son not to cut down the old pear tree outside the window, the pear tree will not be cut down for as long as the son remembers his father with love.
This has little to do with any religious belief in the eternal life of the soul. It's simply that a dead person I love will never be dead for me. I can't even say: "I loved him"; no, its: "I love him." And my refusing to speak of my love for him in the past tense means that the dead person is. That may be the seat of man's religious dimension. Indeed, obedience to a last wish is mysterious: it goes bevond all practical and rational thought: the old peasant will never know, in his grave, if the pear tree has been cut down or not; yet for the son who loves him, it is impossible to not obey him.
Long ago I was moved (I still am) by the end of Faulkner's novel The Wild Palms. The woman dies of a botched abortion, the man is in prison under a ten-year sentence; a white tablet, poison, is brought to him in his cell; but he quickly dismisses the idea of suicide, because his only way of prolonging the life of the beloved woman is to preserve her in his memory.
"… so when she became not then half of memory
became not and if I become not then all of remembering will cease to be.-Yes, he thought, between grief and nothing I will take grief."
Later on, writing The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, I immersed myself in the character Tamina, who has lost her husband and is trying desperately to recover, to gather, scattered memories so as to reconstruct a person who has disappeared, a bygone past; it was then that I began to understand that a memory doesn't give us back the dead person's presence; memories are only confirmation of his absence; in memories the dead person is only a past that is fading, receding, inaccessible.
Yet if it is impossible for me ever to regard as dead the being I love, how will his presence be manifested?
In his wishes, which I know and with which I will keep faith. I think of the old pear tree that will stand outside the window for as long as the peasant's son shall live.
Milan Kundera
