Substance, Not Person

 Yesterday's obituary for Ted Turner in the New York Times quoted a number of appalling anecdotes about his reactionary youth, which made me think this guy does not register as a worthy person. But it also included a single story of personal loss from Turner's biography that was profoundly humanizing. 

The article talks about the fact that Turner lost his younger sister to lupus and encephalitis when he was in his twenties. Obviously, with my dad's situation in the hospital, I'm emotionally keyed in to anything I read or see that touches on death—so it's perhaps not surprising that this got to me. Turner "described her death as the reason he lost his religious faith," according to the Times write-up. 

I thought back to that passage from Henry Adams's autobiography—about his own sister's agonizing death from lock-jaw: 

The last lesson—the sum and term of education—began then. He had passed through thirty years of rather varied experience without having once felt the shell of custom broken. He had never seen Nature—only her surface—the sugar-coating that she shows to youth. Flung suddenly in his face, with the harsh brutality of chance, the terror of the blow stayed by him thenceforth for life, until repetition made it more than the will could struggle with; more than he could call on himself to bear. He found his sister, a woman of forty, as gay and brilliant in the terrors of lockjaw as she had been in the careless fun of 1859, lying in bed in consequence of a miserable cab-accident that had bruised her foot. Hour by hour the muscles grew rigid, while the mind remained bright, until after ten days of fiendish torture she died in convulsion.

[...] Death took features altogether new to him, in these rich and sensuous surroundings. Nature enjoyed it, played with it, the horror added to her charm, she liked the torture, and smothered her victim with caresses. [...] For many thousands of years, on these hills and plains, Nature had gone on sabring men and women with the same air of sensual pleasure. [...] The first serious consciousness of Nature's gesture—her attitude towards life—took form then as a phantasm, a nightmare, an insanity of force. For the first time, the stage-scenery of the senses collapsed; the human mind felt itself stripped naked, vibrating in a void of shapeless energies, with resistless mass, colliding, crushing, wasting, and destroying what these same energies had created and labored from eternity to perfect.

As B.S. Johnson writes in one of his prose works: "today what characterises our reality is the probability that chaos is the most likely explanation[.]" He adds, in his book The Unfortunates—about his friend's cruel death from cancer: "it is all chaos." 

For Henry Adams, too—like Turner—the incident of his sister's painful and unjust death was a finishing blow to any belief he might have had left in a conventional God.

[T]he idea that any personal deity could find pleasure or profit in torturing a poor woman, by accident, with a fiendish cruelty known to man only in perverted and insane temperaments, could not be held for a moment. For pure blasphemy, it made pure atheism a comfort. God might be, as the Church said, a Substance, but He could not be a Person.

As Leopardi once framed the eternal questions: "why the human race was made, why it suffers pain and misery,/where ultimately fate and nature drive us,/whom our enormous pain brings pleasure or profit to [....]"

Adams's invocation of "Nature" in all her ruthlessness calls to mind Leopardi as well: 

How, O Nature, does your heart let you sever 

friend from friend, brother from brother, 

child from parent, 

loved one from lover, and, when one has died, 

expect the other to live on? 

How could you let so much pain 

be necessary to us, in that mortal has to keep on loving mortal? 

But Nature in her actions is concerned 

with something else besides our pain or joy. (Galassi trans.)