Thor's Day: The sense of life...

Hugues de Montalembert

...is life

By Morris Dean

Struck as I have been by Hugues de Montalembert, whose book Invisible: A Memoir I reviewed Sunday (and from which I shared a quotation in last week's "Thor's Day" column), I have continued to meditate on his writings and try to learn more about him.
    Curiously, after extensive research on the Internet, I have found no record of Hugues de Montalembert's birth date, although I did find a reference to the death of someone of that name in June of this year—someone else, apparently. Wikipedia has no article on Hugues de Montalembert, and his entry in the Internet Movie Database says next to nothing.
    But finally, in one of those snippets of present-tense reportage from the hospital following the attack on his eyes, I found a clue: "I must remain capable of bringing back the world I looked at intensely for thirty-five years." [p. 84 of Invisible] That is, he was 35 years old when attacked—on May 24, 1978, as confirmed by an article in the May 26, 1978 New York Times.
    There is also a reference in a February 17, 1986 article in People Magazine to de Montalembert's age then. He is referred to as "still proud and youthful-looking at 42." [Maybe I've narrowed his birth date to between mid-February and about mid-May 1943?]
    So what? Well, forgive me for pausing to reflect that I was 35 in 1978...half a lifetime ago.
    What did de Montalembert make of life as he approached 70? (Invisible was published in 2010.)

Since I lost my sight I have had two very close friends commit suicide, and they told me they couldn't understand why I didn't commit suicide.

Suicide? No. Orders are to go on living, meanly, painfully, scrupulously.
...
Whatever we do, there is always hope for redemption.
    If I lose hope, then I will commit suicide.
    Do you know the writings of Primo Levi? At Auchwich he was put in a situation where to live was impossible. Yet, through a formidable instinct and strength of character and fight, he survived. Very few survived. And yet, many years later, he committed suicide. Why? He knew something that he didn't write about. He came out from that death camp without God and without Man.
    He knew that you can live without God, but you can't live without Man. That is to say, without believing in Man.

Why do you want to live? Why do you want to die?

I think as long as you wake up in the morning full of hope, you are in a good shape....

To despair of life is to not know what life can bring you. It can bring redemption, not in a religious way, but redemption in a vital way....

Strangely enough, I must say, blindness didn't change my life that much.
    I thought it would drastically change, but I must observe that it has not.
    It made me more forceful in obtaining what I want.

What we are all looking for is the sense of life.
    And the sense of life is life.
    Once you have understood that, you can relax.

The sense of life is not to go to the realms of God and all that.
    Eternity is now.
...
At the end you must know that you will be defeated....

You better eat life while you can because at the end, like everybody else, your body will be defeated.... [–Invisible, pp. 113, 117-122]

Like a gift, an occasion arose the day I prepared the above to simply illustrate its application to ordinary, everyday life.
    My son emailed me from Sofia to ask whether I could help him by scanning and emailing him some sheet music from the UNC Greensboro music library. At my age and today's gasoline prices, I don't just casually jump into a car and drive to Greensboro, but of course I wanted to help my son, and I assumed that I would. He needed the music urgently for his string quartet in Sofia. So, I told him I'd talk with his mother and see whether we could come up with some mutually beneficial reason for going to Greensboro.
    Like it was meant to be, she and I quickly devised the plan of arising early the next day and leaving in time to arrive at the UNC Greensboro campus even before the library opened (at 7:45) so that we (including Siegfried) could have our morning walk in a new setting before the high heat of day (which comes by 8 o'clock these particular days of Southern Summer).
    It was wonderful! The temperature was perfect, and very still. We had never walked around much of the campus before. We knew how nice the gardens near the music building are, from having walked in them the first time we went over to hear a piano recital by our cousin André Duvall—who might have carried out our son's project if he hadn't recently relocated to Memphis to complete his doctoral dissertation. (Also, the sheet music our son required was not available in Memphis.)
    But we didn't know—didn't even suspect—how marvelous the campus is overall! So many long vistas on the UNCG campus! Obviously, the individuals who over the years had laid out the buildings and walkways and plantings...knew what they were doing.
    We started our walk by crossing a long bridge over the gardens mentioned above, soon turning right and walking about 600 feet up a rise to the street and there turning left to meander through the "front yards" of ten or twelve campus buildings before turning left and shortly finding ourselves at the far end of the long, long—and broad, broad—pedestrian thoroughfare on whose other end we had begun our walk (without knowing because of a near rise that we could have walked so far if we had gone straight ahead after crossing the bridge).
    The rise is much nearer the music building than the opposite end of the thoroughfare. The vista back toward the rise looked to be about a quarter of a mile, or more. It was literally breathtaking, judging by my own sense of awe and delight...of life's unexpected pleasures when you relax and think positively....
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Copyright © 2013 by Morris Dean

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