The deaths of three friends in the past seven months has me thinking about immortality — not Plato’s view of the immortal soul, or the Bible’s, but simply what lasts of our lives after we go.
The lives of my friends were prominent, so one might think that their works would long outlast them. Lance Morrow, the essayist; Jules Feiffer, the cartoonist and writer; and David Childs, the architect who built One World Trade Center (also known as the Freedom Tower), oversaw the Moynihan Train Hall extension of Penn Station in New York, 7 World Trade Center and much more. If anyone could achieve immortality on earth, these three should qualify.
Yet history teaches otherwise. David Childs’s masterworks could crumble to dust. The words of Jules and Lance could be forgotten in a trice. Practically no one would have heard of John Donne today had T.S. Eliot not resurrected his name. We want valued things to last, but so often they don’t.
The lives of my three friends, though, are vivid in my mind. I easily and gladly resurrect our conversations, the artistic and political opinions we shared, our special terms of reference, our shorthand private language. These are my souvenirs.
David and I met when our families lived near each other in Washington, in the ’70s. Our wives and children were friends and remain so, though distances intervened. David was especially good with our children. He taught our eldest, Carl, a trick with algebra, which Carl, now 59, remembers to this day. A major international figure in architecture, David remained quiet and modest throughout his life. Amused if annoyed by the prevailing assumption that the tallest building was the best, he spoke of installing a device in his home with a button he could push to raise the needle of Freedom Tower a few feet whenever a taller building went up, so that his would always be in first place.
David died with an especially pernicious form of dementia. He could not recall building anything in his life, the cruelest way a thing can crumble.
Jules, knowing what bad Jews we both were, insisted that I promise to give his eulogy in Hebrew. We, too, met long ago when I was the literary editor of the New Republic in the mid-70s. The magazine wanted him to do a cover on President-elect Jimmy Carter, so I went to New York to meet the artist I had admired since I was in high school.
From that first meeting he had an innocent lilt of surprise in his voice, and laughter as well, as if to embrace a world that was ripe for ridicule and correction. “Roger!” I can hear him saying now over the phone, whether I called him or he called me.
Lance and I worked closely together at Time magazine for nearly 20 years in the ’80s and ’90s. Our assignment was to write the magazine’s Essay page, on which we alternated weekly. We had a ball, popping into each other’s offices, with comments or wisecracks about the news — the heroism or idiocy of one or another public figure. It felt as if we were directly involved in the events of the world. And when something big happened, one of us was called upon to try to understand it for millions of readers. It was a challenge and a privilege.
Rather than being competitors, we tried to be of use to each other. I never had a better reader of my work. This relationship extended long beyond our years at Time. Right up to his last days, we exchanged things we were working on, knowing always that we could rely on each other for straight talk and creative thought.
In his “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood,” Wordsworth called life merely “a sleep and a forgetting,” suggesting that human existence is pure and more valuable before it enters the earth. This was a stock belief of the Romantic writers, that we exist in paradise before we take corporeal form. “Heaven lies about us in our infancy!”
Wordsworth’s view of immortality was that nature gave him access to a world of lost innocence and that that world has its own life, forever. That is, immortality is all around us, not ours to achieve.
A nice thought but I never saw the sense in it, since the shames and glories of living need not descend from heaven to be real. One wonders, nonetheless, is any of this really happening? Life, I mean. What evidence is there?
Yet Wordsworth was on to something in thinking about immortality as atmospheric. Jules, Lance and David really happened, and I know this not because of their achievements on paper or of steel and pilings, but rather because of what I feel now, still, for my three friends.
That feeling abides, and I shall bequeath it to others, to you among them, before I, too, become someone’s memory. At my age (85 this year), one cannot help thinking of mortality. Immortality, if considered at all, is less important than more easily achieved goals. Pleasure in the work itself. Usefulness. Kindness. An eagerness and readiness to be of help. These are the same things I remember about my friends. What matters to me is what mattered to them, which is probably why we were friends in the first place, and these things are subsumed in the realm of general feeling.
There is a simple word for this feeling, which we sometimes use too casually yet has all the power of and reason for life in it, and is immortal in itself. “What will survive of us is love,” the poet Philip Larkin wrote. Not the quick and fleeting kind of love, but rather love as an overwhelming embrace, a memorial of the heart.
Roger Rosenblatt is the author of “Making Toast,” “Cold Moon,” and “Rules for Aging.”
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