A Piece on Obits

There comes a time in every man’s life when the obituary page becomes the first thing he reads. My regimen at age 79 is to start my online day reading the New York Times op-ed columns. In Weimar, Germany, six hours ahead of New York, the op-eds are there before the daily edition is formally declared, shortly after 7 a.m. Central European Time. My day proper begins with Times obits. The Philadelphia Inquirer, my hometown daily, is even slower getting online, so I don’t get to their obits until the end of my morning read.

Then it’s a walk to the in the Herzogin Anna Amalia (Goethe’s patroness) Bibliotek to peruse the International Herald Trib—not a good obit paper, usually just a few shortened reruns of NY Times obits—followed by the Guardian’s obits, which are the most civilized celebratory essays in print accessible to me. (When I taught summers in London between 1968 and 1974 I remember being stunned by the quality of the London Times obits.)

If some Biggie packs it in, as the 94-year-old Milton Friedman did on November 16, the website Arts and Letters Daily (kindly sponsored by the Chronicle of Higher Education) will flex its internet muscle and give you links to more than a dozen takes at that life at death. When I migrated to Santa Rosa in 1982, having told Beaver College on Walt Whitman’s birthday to shove it (gently), the first public meeting I attended was graced by Milton and Rose’s presences. Doing the math, I was then 55, and he was 70. He was a noble Nobel, no nebbish of the most dismal of all sciences, and so was his wife. I wanted to take a Keynes to his skull, he so outblathered me, stuck as I was in my dwindling Marxist phase.

The German dailies are prolific in their obits of cultural and political personalities, especially Europe-wide. Not that they’re parochial about the rest of the world. But the history-obsessed Teutons will rarely miss the birthday celebrations of alive characters and the every-decade anniversaries of dead but not to be forgotten Germans. These features dominate the Feuilleton sections of the big dailies (www.signandsight.com) as well as the kultur page (number four) of the two local dailies I read to improve my German (Thuringer Algemeine and Thuringer Landes Zeitung). Memento, homo, Du bist Leser und gibt es keine Zeitungen in Ewigkeit.

As a professional humanist, I admire the tradition of keeping the past alive. As a soon-to-die reader, I have my ambivalences.

The best part of the New York Times obit page is discovering characters you totally missed in your oh-too-busy life. The other day, for example, I learned about one Professor A. Friedman, who coined the term “illiterature” to allude to the popular ballads he collected, following the lead of that 19th Century Harvard Titan, Francis Childs, who made a career of collecting Scottish Ballads.

Today that old semantic punster, William Safire, got off a jewel about a new book on Slanguage. Thank the godlike Sulzbergers for small favors. A good obit not only makes you regret you never ran across its subject, but if it’s really good, you feel like, well, you almost did run into him! The quirkier the better. To disimprove on Ezra Pound’s catchy aphorism, “Literature is news that stays news”: “Great obits are the last news fit to print.”