The Book Against Death
Long live Elias Canetti
It’s September! School is starting up again, energy is shifting. For those of us who have lived most of our lives on the academic calendar — for me, I should say — fall brings a kind of New Year energy, a time to make resolutions and new schedules and try new things.
In that spirit, I am launching a new endeavor this fall, a series of grief writing workshops. I’m not entirely sure yet what these will be or what they could become, but I’m excited to dive in, with the help of my first participants, who will (I hope) help me to shape the goals and plans for future. I first conceived of these workshops while listening to Anderson Cooper’s grief podcast All There Is, which I recommend, and particularly to this episode, where he interviews filmmaker Kirsten Johnson. Johnson, whose mother died of Alzheimer’s in 2007, made a documentary film with her father, Dick Johnson, who himself was suffering from dementia, as a way to grapple with her anticipatory grief and the very real fact of losing him. In the film (which I have not yet seen, shamefully, just because I seem unable to bring myself to watch or read anything involving dementia these days), “Dick Johnson Is Dead,” Johnson’s father “dies” over and over, in more and more ridiculous ways — he falls down a flight of stairs, an air conditioner falls on him. And then he always comes back to life.
The piece that most struck me, in addition to the idea of this kind of light-hearted creativity in the face of something so deadly serious, is Johnson’s statement that “it’s never too late to get to know someone you love more deeply, even after they’re gone.” Something about this sparked an idea in me - what if you had a workshop where participants deliberately explored their relationships with their losses through creative work, investigating the way these relationships might still deepen and change?
Anyway. That was the seed. I’m still not totally sure where it will take me/us. But if you’re interested in joining on the journey, there are still spaces open in the second workshop this fall, more details here (and just DM me with any questions).
But now to what I really want to share in today’s newsletter. It has been a summer of a lot of reading, pretty all over the place. I read two books by Jill Ciment, The Body in Question and Consent, both of them great. I read two books by Emmanuel Carrère, Yoga and The Kingdom, also both fascinating. I read Edouard Louis’ new book in French! I read Ishiguro’s An Artist of the Floating World, and Miranda July’s All Fours (I’m mostly sharing these to make sure you know I don’t *only* read books about death, ha). But the book that stood out the most is one which I only just finished — Elias Canetti’s The Book Against Death.
I am embarrassed to admit that I had barely even heard of Canetti, though he won the Nobel Prize in 1981. I found the book randomly in a bookstore in Paris this summer, caught by the title and the book flap description: “In 1937, Elias Canetti began collecting notes for the project that ‘by definition he could never live to complete,’ as translator Peter Filkins writes in his afterward. The Book Against Death is the work of a lifetime: a collection of Canetti’s aphorisms, diatribes, musings and commentaries on and against death — published in English for the first time since his death in 1994 — interspersed with materials from philosophers including Goethe, Walter Benjamin and Robert Walser.”
1937 was the year Canetti’s mother died. His father had died when Canetti was just seven years old, but it was his mother’s death that sparked him to begin this project that would continue until his own death in 1994. Born in Bulgaria in 1905 to a family of sephardic Jews, Canetti grew up mainly in Vienna after the death of his father. He moved to England in 1938 to escape Nazi persecution and became a British citizen in 1952, but he always wrote in German. In addition to a series of memoirs, one novel, a number of plays, and a non-fiction book called Crowds and Power, a psychological study of crowd behavior, he also left behind a few collections of Aufzeichnungen, translated as “records,” or “briefs,” or “notes.” As Josh Cohen writes in the introduction to his selection of Canetti’s writing, I Want to Keep Smashing Myself Until I am Whole, “Canetti’s daily dedication to these notebooks turned them into the realest of his memoirs, almost a real-time diary of his thoughts, with hardly any autobiographical context.” Of these, The Book Against Death is perhaps the most centered, focused as it is on a lifetime preoccupation of Canetti’s — anger at the fact of death, outrage at the human acceptance of it, desire for immortality for all.
Reading the book, one is given the rare gift of tracing a writer’s thoughts on a single subject over nearly an entire lifetime. Because of Canetti’s early loss, death was a subject that preoccupied him from an early age (“My father’s death was at the center of every world I found myself in,” he wrote in his memoirs) — a preoccupation I relate to — and in tracing the continuity of this preoccupation one also sees (and is often comforted by) the ebbs and flows of another writer’s doubts, his frustrations and confusions, his fantasies, his pain.
On the 15th of February, 1942 (most of the fragments in the book are undated, except for the year, but this one has a date), Canetti wrote:
Today I decided that I will record thoughts against death as they occur to me, without any kind of structure and without submitting them to any tyrannical plan. I cannot let this war pass without hammering out a weapon within my heart that will conquer death.
In 1943, he wrote:
For many years nothing has moved or consumed me more than thoughts of death. The totally concrete and sincere, constant goal of my life is the attainment of immortality for every human. There were times when I wanted to make this the central figure of a novel that I would call ‘Death’s Enemy.’ During this war it became clear to me that one must speak directly and openly of one’s convictions about such important matters, which are tantamount to a religion. Thus I note down everything I can about death that I would want to share with others, leaving behind ‘Death’s Enemy’ entirely for now. I can’t say that this will remain the case; it could be that he will be resurrected in the coming years in a different form than I had imagined earlier.
He refers back many times over the years to this unwritten novel, which he never did write, leaving instead this book of aufzeichnungen, a form perhaps better suited to the struggle which does not end. Becca Rothfeld, in her wonderful piece about the book in The Washington Post, wrote: “The Book Against Death…can’t save all of us, as Canetti longed to, but there is a small portion of immortality to be found in it nonetheless. An unfinished book is the only thing I know of that never dies.” I love this description because in a way it describes the form, giving a shapeless thing a shape which in fact perfectly matches its content. By leaving this book unfinished, Canetti gave it the most fitting form. I also love her description of the book as, “for the most part…one long shriek.”
It is Canetti’s anger that is perhaps the most refreshing aspect of the work. He’s pissed off! Year after year his anger remains - and he’s not only angry about a particular death, a loss of his own, but about death as a concept, death as a phenomenon that we all accept. I don’t think I’ve ever read a writer directly asking the question of why we, as a species, accept death as a matter of course. It’s an absurdity, as he acknowledges, to be angry about a fact of our lives that cannot change, to even utter the word “immortality” — and yet of course anger is also the most appropriate emotion. Which is his point. Why aren’t more of us angry? This acceptance of death, he argues, leads to our complacency, which is in part what enables our modern phenomenon of mass death, accepted as any other. “Mass death is no longer the exception,” he wrote in 1986, “for everything flows into it. In the rush towards it the individual death loses its weight. Given how many more people there are — can they each die an individual death? When that is no longer possible, we will have reached the point of no return.” One may argue, given our current moment, that this is where we are.
He is angry, too, at the callousness of human beings - he writes through WWII and about the wars to follow. In his first memoir he wrote, “There is almost nothing bad that I couldn’t say about humans and human-kind. And yet my pride in them is so great that there is only one thing I really hate: their enemy, death.”
I am also very moved by the way Canetti describes the person who experiences death at a young age — a club membership none of us want, but which confers qualities many of us recognize, a twisted sense of belonging. In 1977 he wrote: “Whoever opens himself up too early to the experience of death can never close himself off, a wound that turns into a lung through which you breathe.” This description is perfect.
Finally (not finally, really, there is so much more to say about the book but not in this limited space), I appreciate the recurring questions as to what we leave behind — how we interact with the leavings of our dead, but also how we square with what each of us will leave behind us when we go. These are questions I’ve been asking myself a lot since my mother died, as I sift through her things, holding objects that have been rendered priceless to me, and yet at the same time that seem to represent dark facts about what matters in the end. My mother who filled notebooks with grammar as she was learning foreign languages, who filled a notebook while she was reading Dante, but who then, in dementia, lost her ability to properly think — what was it all for? When any of us come up close to the death process, I think, these questions inevitably arise. What is it all for if it is, in a sense, for nothing? And if it will all disappear, how do we live the most meaningful life we can in the time we are here?
In 1993, the year before his death, at 88, Canetti wrote:
We leave nothing behind. We leave sentences that are falsely written and even more falsely understood.
However, if it is all pointless, if 88 years really comes to nothing worthwhile, when every hour of every day, every month and every year comes to absolutely nothing—then why do you constantly keep writing about what vexes you? Are not these sentences meant to be read by someone who through them comes to his senses, takes them in hand, considers them, thinks about them and is done with them?
His words comfort me. To witness a great writer struggling with these questions year after year, to be reading, long after his death, the sentences that Canetti wrote about what vexed him, to watch him continue to keep writing these things even as he felt it might be useless, helps me, too, to continue on. We keep at it, it is all we can do. We wonder in our writing what it is all for. If we reach another in her own questioning, perhaps it is not for nothing. We work. We live.
Below are some of my favorite passages from the book, presented without the interference of my own words. If there are multiple passages under a single year it means they were written that same year. “Long live Dick Johnson,” says Kirsten Johnson - she and Anderson Cooper discuss what a much better phrase this is to use than “I’m sorry for your loss.” I agree.
Long live Elias Canetti.
From The Book Against Death:
1943
The purest expression of culture is an Egyptian tomb, where everything that is vain lies about — utensils, jewelry, nourishment, paintings, sculpture, prayers — and yet the dead person is still not alive.
1944
Sometimes I want to find sentences that will make God stand ashamed before me. Then no one else will die.
In order not to become more understandable, simply don’t die.
1946
Humankind’s forms of belief formulate themselves as circles or straight lines. Progress, say the heartless and clever, and they think of everything as an arrow (escaping death through murder). Recurrence, say the tender-hearted and perservering, and they weight themselves down with guilt (making death boring through repetition). Then, inside the spiral, we try to fuse them together and in doing so combine both attitudes towards death, the murderous and the repetitive. Death then stands a thousand times more powerful than before, and whoever stands up to it as the one-time event it really is, they are defeated with arrows, lines and spirals.
To some death is like a sea, to others it is hard as a rock.
1949
Aboriginal Australians, people of the Stone Age, believe in an eternal dreamtime, the time of myths from whence they come and to which they return again. From it they have not come to something; they have just been taken away from something. Their belief is the greatest of all, the only one that I sometimes share, and if I were an Aboriginal person, I would hold to it always. But since I have the doubtful luck to be a modern person and live in London, for the most part I don’t believe it at all. Only to the exten that I am a writer am I aborginal.
1952
I am waiting for the sensible death of a person I have known, and I know that such a thing does not exist. It is always senseless.
1953
Her handwriting, which becomes ever more precious the more it becomes unreadable; most precious of all when it no longer means anything. The fear that her letters could disappear inside my pocket. When does something begin to turn into a relic? When does one tremble before the most trivial object simply because a loved one made it or held it in their hand? When does one begin to guard it as if it were the thing most worth living for, even more than the loved one herself? I cannot grasp what is delayed in the process, what you have to experience again and again in order to take it seriously: what you can only experience singularly, what you never master, because you can never accept it. In fact, it’s quite the opposite, for you think that it is possible to remain by saying to death, ‘No! No!’ Yet why does it matter to death when that is its greatest triumph, when all it leads to is a mere object being suffused with the love of the person one has lost! Whether there is an intention behind that which we call death, we cannot know, but if there is an intention, it can only be this: the reduction and debasement of the living to a trifling object, a trace that amounts to not even a millionth of what the living once amounted to.
The dead tear us away from the living, and all the more strongly the closer we are to the dead. We cannot stand the bursting forth of the living, the pose they take, the helplessness and powerlessness they feel in relation to the dead who never leave you. It is a barbaric injustice that the living walk the earth, supersede the legacy of the dead and walk all over them. We stand on the side of those fallen and despise the victors. It is so easy to wish that someone would die; it is much harder to keep someone alive. The partisan feeling towards the dead is so strong that we lump together the dead one with everyone else in the race, simply because we are still alive, and we forget that each of them, even when we are the first to lose the race, should be just as important to us as any other.
1954
We never know ahead of time what will be the most precious thing to those who are left behind, meaning that perhaps someone will press some old pair of worn-out shoes to their lips long after all of your papers have been burned.
1955
What does a man want, what drives him to put one foot in front of the other
Along the ridiculous/heartless city streets,
What does a man want, what opens his eyes
Again each morning, what does a man want,
What halts his breath in the middle of a dream,
What does a man want, what opens/offers
Bad/poisoned/wretched food to his mouth, empty books/deceptive words offered to the spirit
What does a man want when he curses,
What does a man want when he offers praise,
What does a man want when he never follows any path to its end,
What does a man want, when he never leaves his old haunts behind.
What does a man want when he falls, and what does he want when he rises,
What when he waits for days and weeks, moons and years,
What when he hunts/drives out children and enemies and dogs and women,
What does a man want, what does a man want.
What does a man want when he moans,
What does a man want when he dies,
What does a man want when he laughs,
What does a man want when he yells/rampages,
What does a man want, what does a man want.
What does a man want when he grovels,
What does a man want when he flies,
What does a man want when he believes,
What does a man want when he scoffs.
What does a man want, what does a man want.
What does a man want when he lies, what when he cruelly speaks the truth,
What when he begs, what when he gives.
What when he gives something away, what when he steals.
What when he spits, what when he swallows,
What when he weeps, what when he hits,
What does a man want when he murders.
What does a man want when he loves.
What does a man want, what does a man want.
A man wants,
A man wants to find his dead.1956
The beyond is within us: a grave realization, but it is trapped within us. This is the great and irreparable fissure of modern humans. For within us is also the mass grave of all creatures.
1968
How little hatred of death there is in literature! But this small amount needs to be found, collected and mixed together in a concentrated form. A Bible against death could supply man with strength when they feel like giving up. It will also separate one’s own defiance from hubris, for how is it possible to stare death down on one’s own? I’m not looking for allies, rather witnesses. For would it not be awful if my own tough-minded, fearless stance against death is in the end ‘explained away’ as psychological, as if it only springs from special circumstances in my own life, and thus means something to me alone? Whenever such a stance is found in others it belongs to a different life, and thus the probability that it also belongs to every life is far greater.
1969
To find a stronger word for love, a word that would be like the wind, but come from beneath the earth, a word that doesn’t need mountains, but dwells in immense caves from whence it travels through the valleys and the plains like water that is not water, like fire that doesn’t burn, but shines through and through, like a crystal, which doesn’t cut and instead is transparent, a pure form, a word like the voices of animals, as if they understand one another, a word like the dead, but all alive again.
How does one live with this immense mass of powerful memories?
Is it possible to thin them out and live more freely? The images that one carries within oneself are weakened by nothing. Everything that belongs to the dead is strengthened within us day by day. We become the conservators of their lives. They cannot be suppressed, for what is real is now them. They appear and talk ceaselessly, as if we give them blood to drink. Perhaps it is such that all of one’s life is transformed into the lives of the dead. What you see, what you hear, what you smell, they feed on it all.That which is named remains alive.
1971
Do you wish to renounce the transformation of the dead within us? In their transfiguration you recognize the source of beauty. That which can no longer exist becomes beautiful. That which cannot be attained is transformed. An amazing word - how much must fall away, how much that is trivial and unsettling has to disappear in the process of transformation. The splendor of the dead is that they were once here and are remembered. Do you wish to renounce it all, can you?
1976
Each must grapple with death anew. There are no rules that are handed down.
1977
Whoever opens himself up too early to the experience of death can never close himself off, a wound that turns into a lung through which you breathe.
1980
There is nothing more specific than death. Yet everything that is said about it is so general.
1981
And if death were not to exist, where would the pain of loss be? Is it the only thing that speaks for death: that we need this immense pain, and that without it we would not be worthy of being called human beings?
1982
What’s astonishing is that we live as if we had nothing to do with death. This duality: that we encounter it everywhere and nevertheless behave as if we can avoid it, that everyone recognizes its worthiness and yet some deny it (since we build houses, make plans, give assurances) — this duality is a kind of falseness at the heart of existence.
1986
In our time the social world surrounding death has radically changed. Mass death is no longer the exception, for everything flows into it. In the rush towards it the individual death loses its weight. Given how many more people there are — can they each die an individual death? When that is no longer possible, we will have reached the point of no return.
1987
It also needs to be considered that such a book against death, if it is read after you have died, could serve as evidence of the failure of its own ideas. The book could as a result lose its own power and seem more the account of a chimera.
1990
What I will leave behind nags at me. Thoughts are not possessions. Thoughts must spring up and they must be able to conceal themselves. Thoughts change their weight over time. Thoughts burn bright and fade. Thoughts moan and are pummeled with silence. How can a thought be left behind?
The ‘childish’ thing about you is that 78 years after the death of your father, when you were 7, you still have not accepted it. This childishness, precisely this kind of childishness, is what the world really needs.
1993
We leave nothing behind. We leave sentences that are falsely written and even more falsely understood.
However, if it is all pointless, if 88 years really comes to nothing worthwhile, when every hour of every day, every month and every year comes to absolutely nothing—then why do you constantly keep writing about what vexes you? Are not these sentences meant to be read by someone who through them comes to his senses, takes them in hand, considers them, thinks about them and is done with them?
Wonderful, Nellie