Testaments Betrayed: An Essay in Nine Parts

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

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[1] At last, an occasion to cite Rene Girard; his Mensonge romantique et verite romanesque is the best book I have ever read on the art of the novel.

[2] Lakis Proguidis, Un ecrivain malgre la critique (Paris: Gallimard, 1989).

[3] Jaroslav Vogel, Leos Janacek (Prague, 1963: revised English translation, New York: W. W. Norton, 1981), a detailed and honest book, but limited in its judgments by its national and nationalistic horizon. Bartok and Berg, the two composers most closely related to Janacek on the international scene: the former is not mentioned at all, the latter barely. How is one to locate Janacek on the map of modern music without these two reference points?