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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: E who wrote (47508)	7/27/1999 7:49:00 PM
From: jbe	Respond to of 108807

Steve, I think you are missing something here. Did you ever read Rilke's Duino Elegies? One of his themes is the power the image of the "early departed" has over us. The image can be especially powerful if the "early departed" were beautiful, and rich, and fortunate....Even if you yourself were never beautiful, rich, or fortunate, the "early departed" can become symbols of your own departed youth, of your own early hopes (before "reality" set in). Personally, I did not watch any of the television coverage of the JFK Jr. story, and I read very few newspaper stories about it. So I cannot complain of over-coverage by the media. (It was easy enough to avoid it, if you wanted to.) At the same time, I can see how the death of these three "early-departed" could have a poetic, symbolic value for people who may have been mourning, at least partly, for themselves. From the First Elegy: ....................................... Certainly, it's strange to inhabit the earth no longer, discarding scarcely learnt customs, no longer using roses and other expressly promised things to give the future a human meaning, to be no more whatever one was in endlessly anxious hands, and even to leave one's name behind like a shattered toy. Strange, the wish to wish no longer. Strange to see all those relations fluttering so loosely in space. And this being dead is painful and full of retrieving, as one gradually sees a little eternity. - But the living are all mistaken, marking divisions so certainly. Angels (they say) often don't know if they pass over or under the living or the dead. The endless torrent tears all ages through both spheres always and in both sounds over them. Finally they need us no longer, the early departed, they wean themselves gently from earth, as one outgrows the mild breasts of a mother. But we, who so desire vast mysteries, whose grief so often springs in blissful progress: can we exist without them? Is the myth pointless, how once, in the mourning for Linos, music's first wager broke the nerveless drought, and how the terrified space, which an almost godlike youth suddenly left forever, first struck in the void that other vibration, which now overwhelms us, and comforts, and helps.

To: E who wrote (47508)	7/28/1999 9:16:00 AM
From: Dayuhan	Respond to of 108807

Your priorities tell you that because one of the three who died worked for an investment bank and was a businesswoman she was worth more to society than the others. I know I said I wasn't going to say anything more, but... That's not what I was thinking. We are an insular people, how many of us have sufficient command of a foreign language and culture to do business successfully in it? If we are going to deal with the rest of the world in any coherent fashion, we're going to need as many such people as we can get. And the fact that millions of people felt close to one of the three individuals, having followed the lives of him and his family since he was a baby Not to belabor a point... well, yes, to belabor a point: why do we choose to follow the lives that we follow? Don't our criteria say something about us?

To: E who wrote (47508)	8/6/1999 1:17:00 AM
From: E	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

Steven, this is a P.S. to this earlier post I made to you during the discussions about JFKjr, and Caroline and Lauren Bessette. A few days ago, I was talking with a couple of NYC people about the deaths, and the public reaction to it, and they made some comments I wanted to mention. First, they both said that, in NYC, at least, it was no mystery why there was a lot of sadness. They said that they, and others among their group of friends, and everybody in NYC, simply saw him around so regularly that he was a familiar fixture, one of the people, neighbors, one feels a certain connection to. They said, for example, that his main mode of transportation in the city was his bike. So he was seen around the city all the time. Also, they said that he was a regular in Central Park among the joggers-- but that he was unlike the other "celebrity joggers," in that "they" all jogged with big sunglasses and hats and scarves and other absurd disguises plus body guards or a retinue. He just put on a sweat suit and jogged like everybody else. He was in the streets all the time, too-- he walked places. He took the subway regularly, too. (This is VERY unusual celebrity behavior.) (I wonder if his banker sister-in-law would have used the subway in New York?) He was a kayaker. (I think I mentioned that before, but I didn't know this story.) And there was a kayak club that is a sort of co-op downtown where he hoped to store his boat. He went in to ask about it, and was told by the people there that it was a co-op, and everybody who used it had to volunteer there once a week. They, of course, expected him to say Nevermind, but he said, Sure, he signed up, and did his stint every week like everybody else. Just thought I'd mention these stories.