EUGENE GOODHEART
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power in art, he admires it without reservation. Here is what he has to
say about his friend, the sculptor Felix Wortruba:
He was interested in two things and in them alone: the power of
stone and the power of words, in both cases power, but in so unusual
a combination of its elements that one took it as a force of nature,
no more open to criticism than a storm.
It
may be that when Canetti writes of stone and words, he is not think–
ing of power in the negative conceptual sense that informs his thinking
in
Crowds and Power.
His struggle against power is also a struggle against death, for the
two are inextricably bound together in his mind. He desires immortal–
ity or longevity, if immortality is unavailable, because of an insatiable
curiosity about life. "The highly concrete and serious, the admitted goal
of my life is to achieve immortality for men." Here he sets himself
against the philosopher's creed that wisdom lies in the graceful accep–
tance of death. For Rilke, a poet with a philosophical gift, death is the
fulfillment of life and only those with unlived lines in their bodies-and
they are legion-fear it. Canetti might have accepted death if he were
guaranteed the time to satisfy his desire to fully know the world. Most
people don't want to die.
If
given a choice with the full knowledge of
the prospect, few would want to live forever, especially if the promise of
immortality was not accompanied by eternal youth. In his beautiful
poem "Tithonus," Tennyson evokes the pathos of the goddess Aurora's
lover, whom she granted immortal life, but not eternal youth.
The woods decay, the woods decay and fall,
The vapours weep their burthen to the ground,
Man comes and tills the field and lies beneath,
And after many a summer dies the swan.
Me only cruel immortality
Consumes; I wither slowly in thine arms. ..
But would eternal youth be sufficient? Wouldn't the boredom of a
several-hundred-year existence become unbearable? Moreover, what
of its consequences for new birth and new life? The virtue of a Chris–
tian conception of an afterlife is that it satisfies a desire for immortal–
ity that doesn't threaten future life on earth. And how does Canetti
reconcile his view of the survivor as "mankind's worst evil" with his own
desire for immortality? Although I do not share his immortal longings, I
