His Grandfather’s Death
His grandfather’s death haunted him incessantly, and yet he had long known what death was, and had though about and been afraid of it. But he had never seen it, and he who sees if for the first time learns that he knows nothing, neither of death nor of life. One moment brings everything tottering. Reason is of no avail. You thought you were alive, you thought you had experience of life; you see then that you know nothing, that you have been living in a veil of illusions spun by your own mind to hide from your eyes the awful countenance of reality. There is no connection between the idea of death and the convulsions of body and soul in combat and in death. Human language, human wisdom are only a puppet-show of stiff mechanical dolls by the side of the grim charm of reality and the creature of life and blood, whose desperate and vain efforts are strained to the fixing of a life which crumbles away with every day.
The author of this passage is Romain Rolland, writing of the reactions of his protagonist, a precocious pre-teen named Jean-Christophe, to his grandfather’s death. I had several reactions when I read it.
—Don’t write about it! Bad career move. You’re not going to match or best the passage. Publish it as post by itself or move on to another topic. But I’m not trying to match or best it, I answered myself, only to consider what it has to say about the theme of this blog.
—Shock. How could the author of Jean-Christophe, a 1500-plus page novel that won Rolland the Nobel Prize for literature in 1915, have disappeared from view? I read of him decades ago—a brief reference in a Henry Miller book—but have no recollection how I came to possess a copy of the English translation from the French, which sat on my bookshelf for years before I took it up.
—No one will care. I thought of my sister’s comment that no one will care about the people and family history she’s trying to keep alive, and of my divided reactions to the commemt. One is that ‘the truth will set you free,’ as did Dr. Howard Spiro saying of the death of my son Jesse, ‘You never get over something like that.’ The other is another truism—‘the truth will come to light;’ Rolland will have his day again. But neither truth is always true.
—Rage and grief. Is the passage even about grief? Or am I forgetting my own rage? Grief has many moods. It is not limited to sorrow. In fact, as I read the passage, I realized that, change a few modifiers and it is an exact description of my own shock and disbelief, after my son’s death, of having been hoodwinked by a papier-mâché version of reality in which I had been a willing participant.
—He goes on. Following his rage at his grandfather’s death, Jean-Christophe finds friendship, and it is all. Then he falls in love, and it is all. The passage embodies a living truth that is passing even as it happens, and is all the truer for not becoming a lifeless statue. I still grieve, perhaps in some ways more deeply than I did in the infancy of my grief. But I have kept going. I like to think Jesse would be glad, knowing I must live without an answer to this wish, and without brushing off as mere infant grief the moment the burning bush spoke to me and the world changed forever.
Rolland, R. Jean-Christophe. Trans. G. Cannon. New York, Henry Holt, 1913, 123-24.
