In 1926: living at the edge of time - Monoskop

IMMANENCE = TRANSCENDENCE (DEATH) 375
Rainer Maria Rilke's last draft for a poem, written only a few days before
his Death on December 29, pushes this experience yet further. Even
before the end of the body's life, Death is present in acute physical
pain-and no existential future lies beyond this boundary:
COME, 0 you final companion that I will recognize,
Pain without relief in the fibers of my body:
As I was burning in the spirit, look, I am burning
In you. Long the wood resisted,
Not responding to the flames with which you blaze.
But now I feed you while I am burning in you.
Pure, without plans and free of a future,
I climbed on the pyre of pain,
Certain not to buy any time
For this heart silent with exhaustion.
(Rilke, 266).
There are two, precisely opposite reactions to the absence of Transcendence
and the presence of Death in human life. The obvious (and obviously
naive) reaction is an urge to escape Death-or to actively forget it.
In Ramon del Valle-Inchin's novel Tirano Banderas, one of the characters
embodies the latter attitude in all its triviality: "[To recognize] that a
particular act is inevitable does not prepare us for its imminence. Death
is inevitable, yet we construct our whole life in an effort to distance it
from us" (Valle-Inclan, 250). The wish to escape Death, however, takes
different forms depending on whether it focuses on the elementary angst
one feels at the idea of life's coming to an end, or on the desire to be
remembered by posterity. Among Spanish intellectuals, the Death of the
great Catalan architect Antonio Gaudi inspires the second of these obsessions.
On Thursday, June 10, as he is walking along his daily route
from the construction site of the Sagrada Familia church to evening Mass
in the same neighborhood, the seventy-four-year-old Gaudi is hit by a
streetcar. He dies before any medical help arrives, because nobody recognizes
him: the famous artist is an unremarkable-looking old man
(Gumbrecht, 847-848). This scene resembles a nightmare that supposedly
plays a crucial role in Miguel de Unamuno's literary and philosophical
writings. Unamuno is obsessed with the fear that he will be forgotten