*Randall Jarrell, "A War"
**"The Eggs Speak Up"
Forgiveness: The Desperate Search For A Concept Of Reality, in Unlearning with Hannah Arendt by Marie Luise Knott, translated by David Dollenmayer
Jarrell had read in Origins that totalitarianism forged a "chain of fatality" – a chain of logical arguments – which threatens to "suppress men from the history of the human race." Jarrell's poem* reads like a response to this sentence since it is about the necessity of interrupting this chain. With this epigraph,** Arendt introduces her listeners to what she has to say. A large and varied group ("different legs") marches off on a winter morning. No head, no belly. Only the legs have set off into a different, better world. But what promised to be a better world is revealed by the title to be a war. The legs are marching in a war of ideologies that has superceded the contest of ideas.
*Randall Jarrell, "A War" **"The Eggs Speak Up" Forgiveness: The Desperate Search For A Concept Of Reality, in Unlearning with Hannah Arendt by Marie Luise Knott, translated by David Dollenmayer Revenge "remains close to the other person" because people manifest themselves to each other in speech and action. That is, even in their mistakes and misdeeds, people are people and form relationships. In the same entry, Arendt went even further to say that forgiveness between equals was a "sham event." The burden someone has put on his own shoulders is apparently lifted, while the other, the forgiving person, must accept a burden and at the same time appear to be "unburdened," to rise above the other and his misdeed. Only thus can the wrongdoer be unburdened of his wrong action. No one, Arendt wrote, can be that unburdened.
Forgiveness: The Desperate Search For A Concept Of Reality, in Unlearning with Hannah Arendt by Marie Luise Knott, translated by David Dollenmayer The very last essay she wrote was titled "Home to Roost," a reference to Malcolm X's speech after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, in which he said that all the chickens were coming home to roost and American imperialism was now reaping what it had sown. In her essay, an elaboration of a lecture she gave on the two-hundredth anniversary of the American Revolution, Arendt warned of the disintegration of democratic power, which could produce a historic break comparable to the one that had ushered in the destruction of the European polity by totalitarianism:
"We may very well stand at one of those destructive turning points of history which separate whole eras from each other. For contemporaries entangled, as we are, in the inexorable demands of daily life, the dividing lines between eras may be hardly visible when they are crossed; only after people stumble over them do the lines grow into walls which irretrievably shut off the past." Translation: The "Oddly Circuitous Path," in Unlearning with Hannah Arendt by Marie Luise Knott, translated by David Dollenmayer One might consider this a pessimistic view of the world – a "tragedy," as she wrote to Jaspers – yet it is one that also "warms and lightens the heart" because despite the revolution's failure, through Arendt's evocation of its memory in writing, the power of revolutionary association to create community and promulgate laws gains immediacy in the eyes of her readers as something of simplicity and greatness. In fact, she kindles in the reader a revolutionary yearning. It is as if the historical personages are precipitated out of the objective historical account and returned to the living, internal stage of their own world, which in turn is conceived of as a public space. The effect is grounded in Plato's idea that literature about tragic things is not, as Aristotle posited, written to make people experience empathy. Instead, its principal aim is to keep alive in the reader (who by reading rehearses taking action) the presence of values and concepts in a world where values have been lost, and to reinvigorate moribund collective ideas. This is the idea that shaped The Human Condition as well as Arendt's essay "Tradition and the Modern Age."
Translation: The "Oddly Circuitous Path," in Unlearning with Hannah Arendt by Marie Luise Knott, translated by David Dollenmayer Photo taken in RISD Museum, Providence RI Of course, Arendt also read American political theory, but she knew that the genius of a language is nourished mainly by its use in literature. In their nakedness and directness, the words of poets break open analytical language and grant the freedom and encouragement to create one's own language and meaning. Poetic metaphor is itself a translation and a celebration of contamination.
Translation: The "Oddly Circuitous Path," in Unlearning with Hannah Arendt by Marie Luise Knott, translated by David Dollenmayer |
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