[HN Gopher] The Last Letter
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The Last Letter
Author : HR01
Score : 57 points
Date : 2025-05-20 17:10 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (aeon.co)
(TXT) w3m dump (aeon.co)
| bee_rider wrote:
| Three mostly unrelated thoughts.
|
| 1) The photo of Tony Bloncourt seems quite well preserved, and
| for whatever reason his style seems pretty modern. It somehow
| creates a bit of cognitive dissonance or something; how could he
| have been killed by Nazis, he looks like the subject of a modern
| drivers license photo.
|
| 2) It is interesting that, despite being so awful, the Nazis let
| people write these last letters. I wonder how this tiny bit of
| humanity survived.
|
| 3) I wonder, is the line
|
| > Today, I will have lived.
|
| An expression, part of a well known poem, or something like that,
| in French? As the article notes
|
| > This turn of phrase, so simple grammatically speaking, is
| deceptively philosophical because it captures the interval that
| separates the writer from the reader, the one who will have lived
| from the one who lives on.
|
| It is a remarkable bit of grammatical sleight of hand to somehow
| pack so much this much reflection on mortality and life into,
| basically, a choice of tenses.
| dhosek wrote:
| > he looks like the subject of a modern drivers license photo.
|
| I was reminded of an interview on Fresh Air around 10 years ago
| or so where a director was talking about going through casting
| photos looking for people who "looked like" they belonged in
| the WWI era. Terry Gross knew exactly what he was getting at
| (as did I), in that outside of clothes and hairstyle, some
| people seem to just seem like they belong in different
| historical contexts (conversely, there are plenty of old
| portraits of people who see, like they belong more in the 21st
| century than the 18th).
| mxuribe wrote:
| This is interesting...when my partner and i watch films
| portraying an older, historic period, we use the term
| "timeless" or "classic-looking" to refer to some actors who
| mostly due to their appearance (and maybe a little makeup)
| can look like they belong in so many different periods. And,
| then there are other actors, who clearly don't seem like they
| would fit in periods outside of our own modern day...and this
| has nothing to do with whether any of the actors look
| attractive or not...its just a thing that some people have
| about their appearance (or not).
| hammock wrote:
| As much as we don't want to think or talk about it, the gene
| pool has changed over time and it shows up in faces.
|
| Not to mention diet, environment etc that also takes
| different tolls on our faces depending on the period.
|
| By that logic there is such a thing as someone who looks like
| they lived in a different time, and would be rare to see
| today (and vice versa).
| thrance wrote:
| OK, so I did a little digging on the guy behind the letter,
| Huynh Khuong An [1]. Turns out he was born in Ho Chi Minh City,
| back when it was called "Saigon" and a French colony.
|
| He arrived in France between his 12th and 15th birthday, and
| then became a philosophy professor, and a communist one at
| that.
|
| This guy was very much an intellectual, which explains the
| pretty and unusual "Aujourd'hui, j'aurais vecu" (Today, I will
| have lived). I don't think I've ever seen it elsewhere, so he
| probably came up with it himself.
|
| His wife was arrested too but survived the war and went on to
| continue her communist activism.
|
| So yeah, definitely an interesting couple.
|
| [1]
| https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hu%E1%BB%B3nh_Kh%C6%B0%C6%A1ng...
| croisillon wrote:
| j'aurai (without a s): future tense, not conditional ;)
| schoen wrote:
| In Latin it's somewhat usual to use the past perfect of "to
| live" to indicate that someone has died.
|
| In Dido's last speech in the _Aeneid_ , before committing
| suicide, one of the things she says is "vixi" ("I have lived").
| Cicero is also known to have used "vixerunt" ("they have
| lived") as a euphemism for reporting on how he had people
| executed.
|
| https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/vixerunt
|
| So maybe this is a classicism in French, or maybe the author
| just thought of it spontaneously.
|
| Latin also has a future perfect like this ("vixero", "I will
| have lived"), but I can't think of an example of people using
| it to talk about imminent deaths.
| atombender wrote:
| You might enjoy the photos of Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-
| Gorski [1]. His photos were taken in the 1800s using an early
| colour photography technique. Many of them look as if they were
| taken today.
|
| Aside from being black and white, photos tend to look old
| because of hairstyles and clothing. The "time traveling
| hipster" [2] is a good example of someone in an old photo
| creating dissonance by not conforming to expectations
|
| [1]
| https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&as_q=Sergei+Mikhailov...
|
| [2]
| https://www.reddit.com/r/timetravelercaught/comments/e82116/...
| exmadscientist wrote:
| > I will have lived
|
| This is one of those constructions that works better in French
| than in English. It has future tense and perfect aspect (so,
| "future perfect"), which gets muddled in English since English
| generally muddles tense and aspect.
| palmotea wrote:
| > 1) The photo of Tony Bloncourt seems quite well preserved,
| and for whatever reason his style seems pretty modern. It
| somehow creates a bit of cognitive dissonance or something; how
| could he have been killed by Nazis, he looks like the subject
| of a modern drivers license photo.
|
| I think it's sometimes easy to get tripped up by funny clothes
| or hairstyles, and forget the people in the past were just like
| us. But there are only so many ways one can do their hair, and
| an oddly contemporary hairstyle can pull us back to the reality
| we're not that different.
| keybored wrote:
| > It is interesting that, despite being so awful, the Nazis let
| people write these last letters. I wonder how this tiny bit of
| humanity survived.
|
| I'm at a loss as to why the Nazis would put their foot down
| over a last smoke or a last letter.
| yapyap wrote:
| I don't wanna be too harsh but I think that learning how to live
| from deathbed letters, especially the deathbed letters from
| people who were going to be sentenced to death is utter nonsense.
|
| The letters were going to be checked by the people that were
| killing you -- the nazis in this example -- so your letter was
| never going to be "fuck those utter pigs" or anything resentful
| of the people that were going to be your murderers because they
| would just be shredded or burnt or destroyed in some way. So this
| has a massive impact on the contents of the letters.
|
| Then there's the unreliability of the narrator on the deathbed, I
| recently read a beautiful article about this about why you should
| not take advice from people on their deathbed or from yourself on
| your deathbed, the inherent bias you have will make you
| unreliable and the things you value and take for granted on your
| deathbed will not necessarily have been things you have always
| had but instead may be things you have worked hard for in your
| life. [1]
|
| Now that's not to say their words are nothingburgers but when you
| have to wholly draw your own conclusions from inherently biased
| letters it starts to feel like we are all pretending to care more
| about these words because of the sacredness of death. No one
| wants to disrespect the dead, no one wants to say "wow, he must
| have been really losing it at the end" and that's a given, not to
| be rude to dead people. That's like punching down to the first
| degree. But like even things that would be considered light
| critiques or nice criticism don't get to be said about take it or
| leave it bodies of work from dead people, because they are dead.
| On the one hand that's a beautiful thing because let's not start
| disrespecting dead people but on the other hand let's keep it
| real.
|
| [1] https://www.hjorthjort.xyz/2018/02/21/the-deathbed-
| fallacy.h...
| xivzgrev wrote:
| I thought of that article too, but these letters are not really
| regret filled. For the most part, they knew what they were
| doing and ready for the consequences.
|
| Rather, they're grieving and saying goodbye to loved ones. And
| the author wonders, how might we live more present to cherish
| our loves ones and feel the moments more deeply?
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