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… a savage race
that hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.
”Ulysses,” by Lord Alfred Tennyson
It's humbling to see how little space is needed to describe a whole life: a cigarette paper would do, said Conrad. In the past 109 days, I have read the obituaries every morning in The New York Times and The Middletown Record. Fewer than five people warranted a full page obituary in the Times. Rudolph Serkin was the only one I knew. His recording of Beethoven's Fifth Piano Concerto was the first 78 rpm I bought, when I was twelve. I have it on compact disc, now, rerecorded.
My analyst died sometime in the past month. His obituary hasn't turned up in the Times, although his humanity and expertise merited more than a cigarette paper. Even a full-page summary would not have captured the essence of his good life. His obituary would not appear in the Middletown Record because he lived on the other side of the Hudson River, but I read them because I am obsessed with deaths right now. Odd how a river can separate us, make those on the other side seem nonexistent. It is as though he never lived at all. One week, he was there, behind his polished mahogany desk. Then the phone call from a strange woman saying he would not make his next appointment. Then the letter, written in an impersonal, stiff English, signed shakily in his own hand, ending his practice.
These last words from him were so uncharacteristic, so pro forma, that I have had to replay our entire nineteen-year relationship to see what I actually know of the real man.
The facts of his life that I know are few: He was born in Leipzig,