In 1926: living at the edge of time - Monoskop

380 CODES COLLAPSED
the self from life and Death: "Today our intoxicant will be wine; tomorrow
it will be power. Tomorrow we will become stern judges over life
and death. To hold life and death in one's hand makes a man feel proud"
(Junger, 49). [see Male vs. Female] In this passage, JUnger speaks of
wielding power over the life and Death of other people; but determining
one's own life and Death inspires the same respect and generates the
same feeling of sober intensity. In Agatha Christie's Murder of Roger
Ackroyd, the treacherous narrator attains the ultimate in contentment
and self-respect when he decides to commit suicide so as to spare his
sister Caroline the cruel disillusionment of learning that he is a murderer:
"Well, she will never know the truth. There is ... one way out ... I
should not like Caroline to know. She is fond of me, and then, too, she
is proud ... My death will be a grief to her, but grief passes" (Christie,
311-312). Hardly ever is a Communist politician as tolerant of a counterrevolutionary
as Leon Trotsky is of Sergei Esenin, in an essay written
shortly after Esenin's suicide: "The harshness of reality defeated him. On
December 27, 1925, he admitted his inferiority, without provocation or
reproach ... Our age is a bitter one, perhaps the bitterest in the history
of so-called civilized humanity. Born in this decade, the revolutionary is
possessed by fanatical patriotism. Esenin was no revolutionary. The
author of 'Pugachov' and 'The Ballad of 26' was the most intimate of
lyric poets. And our age is not a lyrical age. This is the main reason Sergei
Esenin, voluntarily and before his time, abandoned us and his age"
(Toller, 163-164). Trying to discover analogies between human life and
animal life, Theodor Lessing is eager to provide ethical legitimacy for
suicide. Once again, however, the analogies turn out to be quite problematic:
"'Qui potest mori, non potest cogi.' 'Invincible is he who knows
how to die.' Self-destruction and suicide ... exist in nature as well. The
fox bites off its own limb to escape the iron trap. If necessary, the
scorpion turns its poison stinger upon itself" (Lessing, 257).
By comparison, psychoanalysts seem little concerned with all these
efforts to untangle the concepts of Immanence and Transcendence,
Authenticity and Artificiality, Death and Life. Referring to an essay by
Sigmund Freud entitled "Zeitgemiisses tiber Krieg und Tod" ("Contemporary
Reflections on War and Death"), the Dutch psychiatrist August
Staerke explains how some religions, in trying to cope with the fear of
Death, have claimed an identity between Death and life, just like some
modern-day views: "Even civilized societies, in which the phenomenon