Andrei Pleșu: Death and its humor

Holy Easter combines the Passion with the light of resurrection, pain with joy, suffering with hope. Many years ago (about 12), I also realized a more risky equivalence: drama and comedy! It is not about the evangelical doctrine, but about a historical anthology of words and examples that add a secular note of footnotes with minor consoling effects... Here is what I wrote back then.

One of Mircea Dinescu's favorite sayings, a saying that, by the way, drove me crazy in a few lines, is: "Let us not be too pathetic!". A mix of local relativism, tender pacifism, ancestral humor, and good-natured irresponsibility, Mircea's saying has, however, its own metaphysics. It warns against the danger of taking things too seriously. Especially very serious things. Grave. Pathetic. Things, I mean, that are not to be joked about. Like, for example, death. Black hood, sharp needle, suffering, tears, a one-way road, passing into nothingness – these are the attributes and connotations of the common end. What is there to laugh about? Well, however strange it may seem, the perimeter of death leaves enough escape routes for good humor. A cynical good mood sometimes, but not necessarily blasphemous or insensitive. Black humor, the humor of misfortune are legitimate forms of defense against the incomprehensible, the irreparable, the inevitable. Humanity honors itself by not allowing itself to be demolished easily. It resists, it counters, it opposes fatality with derision.

There is no need, always, for great speculative subtleties to defuse the terror of the end. "Folkloric" equivalents of the verb "to die" manage, with very simple means, this performance. "To give the pope's ort" – here is a phrase that transforms the transit into a petty customs bureaucracy. The more ridiculous accident is signaled by the expression "to hit the bucket" or "to give the corner". The French prefer "to break the pipe", and in what some consider the "shadow" of Germany, the proliferation of a more comic terminology, when trying to mitigate the drama of death, is spectacular. "To die" can be "translated" as: "to put on the wooden suit", "to close the umbrella", "to jump into the tub", "to give up the spoon", "to escape taxes", "to go down a floor", "to set eyes on zero", "to see the radishes from the roots", etc. But laughter is not just a "commentary", with a compensatory effect, on death. It can be its cause. "To die of laughter" has sometimes been more than a metaphor. Pietro Aretino, the notorious Italian writer of the 16th century, laughed at a party with such gusto (after hearing a dirty story), that he fell back, overturned his chair, hit his head, and died on the spot. In the height of joy, Sophocles also met his end. He was waiting for the results of a poetry contest and, upon learning that he had won, "hit the bucket" euphorically.

Humor is often the "last" word of the dying. To the doctor who encouraged him by reciting a long list of favorable symptoms, Alexander Pope said, with his last breath: "So, I die of too many good symptoms! I die cured." In an English key, Palmerstone also replied to his less optimistic doctor: "To die? But, doctor, that's the last thing I intend to do!" Humor is not always voluntary. Numa Pompilius asked that no wine be thrown over his ashes, as the ritual required. He feared he would not arrive drunk in the Elysian Fields. Amusing examples of this type are countless. (Some can be found in Isabella Bricard's book, Dictionary of Famous People in the Face of Death, Romanian translation, Albatros Publishing, 2001). But not only celebrities have humorous endings. There is a story about a quirky handyman (Charles-Henri Couvreux) who built himself a domestic guillotine, after which, pleased with his success, he made his will and cut off his head.

Death intersects with all the "categories" of life: love, power, sadness, ecstasy, betrayal, boredom, chance, faith, despair, fulfillment, the absurd. In many cases, it occurs in astonishing circumstances, seemingly provoked by the irony, by the mischievous spirit of a playful deity. Here, for example, is how Aeschylus died. He was sunbathing somewhere in Sicily when a vulture flew over him, with a tortoise in its claws. To be able to devour its prey, the vulture had to break the shell, dropping it onto a hard body. The shiny baldness of the great playwright was the "stone" chosen for this culinary maneuver. The vulture timely released the tortoise, and Aeschylus died instantly, with his head cracked. How can we take such a surreal example seriously? How is it possible to be killed by an eagle that drops a tortoise on your head? Come on! Let us not be too pathetic!

https://www.dilema.ro/situatiunea/moartea-si-hazul-ei