Michael Curschmann (1936-2017)
I am not big on trigger warnings, but
since I am aware that what I have to say today is not particularly amusing or
uplifting, I might as well tell you that in advance. In general I do my best to fulfill
the affirmative role of a “senior citizen” that is assigned to my particular
sociological subdivision. You see
photographs of such people, gray to be sure but tanned and beaming, especially
in advertisements for insurance policies and retirement communities. That is, I am “active”. I have “interests”. I am “engaged with the community”. The motion of the molecules is
incessant. I frolic with my
grandchildren. Yet my subject today is a
disquieting aspect of the aging process—namely the proximity of old age to
death. I do not refer merely to a
heightened personal apprehension of my own mortality, though I am not so
foolish or mendacious as to deny its relevance.
Every person alive this morning will be one day closer to death
tomorrow. But as you get old, you find
that death’s intrusions become more frequent, more disturbing, and more cruel. Your childhood friends, your old classmates,
colleagues and companions with whom you have spent decades of shared labor or
shared aspiration—these people begin to disappear. At first it seems random and aberrant, and
then you look at some membership list of something from 1950, or 60, or even
70—and you realize that some or many or even most of the people on it are now gone. You find yourself reading obituaries and—if
you have even so little a public presence as I do—writing them. You observe and in some measure enter the
sorrow of friends who have lost husbands or wives.
We got back from a stimulating trip
to Michigan, reported on a couple weeks ago.
That was late on a Wednesday. We
anticipated the happy prospect of a brief visit from our dear friend Jim
Magnuson. Jim arrived just before noon
on Saturday at the train station, whence we collected him. We were still in the first couple of hours of
animated, jovial debriefings at our house when the phone rang. On the other end of the line, calling from
Delaware, was the daughter of another close friend, Michael Curschmann. She was distraught. She reported that her father had just died.
Michael lived in a house probably
less than five hundred yards from my own, literally on the next street. In recent years he was a widower, and he
lived alone. It was probably a sudden massive
heart attack that killed him. When
exactly the blow struck I don’t know. It
may have been not very long after our plane was touching down at Newark
Airport. After a couple of days,
suspicious inactivity at his residence alarmed neighbors and led to the
discovery of his body. You read about
such things in newspapers.
Michael was a most distinguished
scholar of medieval German literature.
The praise of his professional accomplishment will rightly occupy the
necrologies of the learned academies of which he was an ornament. I shall no doubt have some part in composing
one or two of these, but his scholarly attainments have little to do with the
sorrow we are now feeling. I might go so
far as to say they are irrelevant to it.
Michael and I were almost exactly of an age. We joined the Princeton faculty at almost the
same time. We were friends for more than
half a century and for at least the last three decades close friends.
Augustine, who is so expert in
pointing out the obvious in its most unwelcome forms, somewhere says that all
our obsequies and funerary rites, our tailored reminiscences and memorial
meditations, while they may pretend to honor or to magnify the beloved dead,
are in fact but palliatives, and often enough rather feeble ones at that, for
the living. Few things are more complete
than death, but it is precisely from that point of view that Michael’s death seems
to me particularly wrong and objectionable. I went away for a few busy days and returned
to something awful, sudden, immobile, and definitive. You want to regard it in some way as
tentative or provisional. Absurdly you
want to search about for something negotiable in it.
I may be among the last admirers of
Tennyson’s “In Memoriam,” written in response to the sudden death of his
intimate friend Hallam in 1833; but for all its Victorian embarrassments I do
admire it. It took Tennyson fifteen
years to finish the poem, and even then one of his principal themes was the
impossibility of finding the right words for the task at hand. “I sometimes hold it half a sin to put
in words the grief I feel,” he writes. “For
words, like Nature, half reveal and half conceal the Soul within”.
