310
PARTISAN RlE V.JEW
chance to "find out"?)-was distressing to me. And yet, quite apart
from the fact that they were unavoidable, such reflections were not
really "inappropriate," even by the sensitive standards I was natural–
ly inclined to apply to myself at the time. I took it that my father
had said,
in
effect : no nonsense (probably he did not quite mean
it, but I think that hardly matters), and it seemed to me there was
somewhat more "nonsense" in the dignity surrounding his corpse–
a dignity that even without my intervention could be maintained
only so long as the embalmer's measures, whatever they might have
been, held good-than in the one indestructible fact that it
was
a
corpse.
If
it was a question of respect for the dead (and I suppose
it
was, or I should not have been troubled, or not quite in this way),
I was willing enough to be "respectful"; the last thing I wished was
to make any gesture of unconventionality. But I had my own rights
in the matter, too; and besides, even in the simplest terms--in the
terms, that is, which I should have used to defend myself if there
had been anyone to accuse me-it was possible to
claim
that with the
program the dead man had however sketchily laid down, too much
"respect" might itself have been a form of "disrespect."
In practice, of course, it is a matter of some
urgen~y
to dispose
of a dead body: a funeral
is
not supposed to raise questions, and
though the particular form it finally assumes may be the result of
numerous decisions, none of them is in itself fundamental; or, more
accurately, it is never possible to know whether a decision
is
fun–
damental or not, but it
is
always easy to make it, since every decision
must in any case lead to getting rid of the body. Can one properly
ask, for instance, what was involved in such an element as the decision
to spend two hundred and seventy-five dollars for a coffin when it
would also have been possible to spend five hundred dollars or, I
suppose, one hundred? The choice of a coffin was hardly important.
Still, the coffin was to contain-and then be destroyed with-the
body of someone who had proposed, no matter with what reserva–
tions, that his ashes should be thrown into an ash can. Was two
hundred and seventy-five dDllars "nonsense"?
If
it was, would one
hundred dollars have been that much less "nonsense"? As you see,
these questions are pointless; there had to be a coffin.
If
nevertheless there was a problem involved somehow in all
this, it is hardly to
be
stated so simply. Perhaps, even, "problem" is too
