Odradek

 

"At first glance it looks like a flat star-shaped spool for thread, and indeed it does seem to have thread wound upon it; to be sure, they are only old, broken-off bits of thread, knotted and tangled together, of the most varied sorts and colours. But it is not only a spool, for a small wooden crossbar sticks out of the middle of the star, and another small rod is joined to that at a right angle. By means of this latter rod on one side and one of the points of the star on the other, the whole thing can stand upright as if on two legs. "

 

"One is tempted to believe that the creature once had some sort of intelligible shape and is now only a broken-down remnant. Yet this does not seem to be the case; at least there is no sign of it; nowhere is there an unfinished or unbroken surface to suggest anything of the kind; the whole thing looks senseless enough, but in its own way perfectly finished. In any case, closer scrutiny is impossible, since Odradek is extraordinarily nimble and can never be laid hold of."

 

- Kafka, description of Odradek in 'The Cares of a Family Man'

 

 

I. 

 

Many critics and philosophers rank Kafka alongside the greats of modernist literature. But, whilst I wouldn't wish to echo Joseph Epstein's dismissal of him as overrated [1], I have nevertheless often found some of Kafka's short stories a little ... not boring exactly - but disappointing.  

 

That's not the case, however, with 'The Cares of a Family Man' [2], in which the world is introduced to the fantastically strange character called Odradek ...

 

 

II. 

 

As the narrator of the tale confesses, Odradek is a name of uncertain origin; it might be Slavic; it could be German, but it's very possibly neither. Confusion over the etymology of Odradek's name, however, is really the least of it - for it's not even clear what Odradek is ... 

 

For whilst they - and I think it probably best we use the gender-neutral pronoun here in its singular sense - can stand up and speak and even laugh, they're also a non-human object who looks rather like a star-shaped cotton reel with bits of old coloured thread wound round in a tangled manner (see Kafka's own description above).  

 

Odradek, however, is nobody's spool and they have a vital presence in the family home; perhaps more vital even than the narrator's and the latter is concerned not only that Odradek undermines his position as husband and father - despite having no real purpose or role - but that Odradek will ultimately outlive him and thereby have the last laugh, extracting what Baudrillard terms the revenge of the object:   

 

"He does no harm to anyone that one can see; but the idea that he is likely to survive me I find almost painful." [3]

 

 

III.

'The Cares of a Family Man' has, as one might imagine, more interpretations than one can shake a stick at; certainly more than I can possibly discuss here - or would wish to, as all the usual readings - Marxist, Freudian, Existentialist - are predictable enough (often very clever and insightful, but unsurprising). 

I think, if anything, I favour a more occult (and object-oriented) musing on the story over and above a political, psychological, or lazy metaphorical attempt at interpretation; a musing that doesn't seek to identify Odradek in the full-light of day (or by the natural light of reason) and which acknowledges that objects are ultimately mysterious (and alluring) because of their withdrawl from human perception.

As Anya Meksin notes, we are asking the wrong questions if we ask what Odradek symbolises or represents: 

 

"The story stubbornly resists an adequate correlation between Odradek and any existing entities or concepts in our world. It is as if the little text has somehow transcended the very system in which symbolism is possible, just as Odradek has somehow transcended the logic of the physical world. Odradek is a metaphysical rupture in the reality of the family man, and the story is an epistemological rupture in the reality of the reader." [4]

 

Ultimately, Odradek is a messenger from the secret realm of objects; not so much a realm humans deny the existence of, but casually dismiss as less interesting than their own. Such anthropocentric arrogance has no place here, however. I maintain that objects not only exist independently of us upon a democratically flat ontology, but, despite our conceited claims of human exceptionalism, we too ultimately have our being upon this plane.   

 

That's what Odradek reminds us: material reality is essentially meaningless; consciousness is epiphenomenal; life is just a very rare and unusual way of being dead. 

 

 

IV. 

 

Readers of a certain age will doubtless recall the Unigate ads on TV in the 1970s which warned viewers to watch out in case there was a Humphrey about [5]. 

 

Well, an Odradek does more than steal your milk; they negate all the illusions, and lies, and convenient fictions upon which human life is built and once you discover, like Kafka's humble family man, that there's one living in your house there are, says Anya Meksin, only two options: "immediate suicide, or continuing along as best we can, given the circumstances" [6].

 

 

Notes

 

[1] See Epstein's article 'Is Franz Kafka Overrated?' in The Atlantic (July/August 2013): click here. 

      For those who might be interested, the critic David L Ulin responds to this piece by Epstein in 'Why Kafka Matters', Los Angeles Times (24 June 2013): click here. 

 

[2] Die Sorge des Hausvaters was written between 1914 and 1917 and published in a collection of Kafka's short stories published by Kurt Wolff entitled Ein Landarzt [A Country Doctor] (1919). 

      The English translation - 'The Cares of a Family Man' - can be found in Kafka's Collected Stories, trans. Willa and Edwin Muir, (Everyman, 1993), pp. 183-85. The story is also in The Complete Stories, (Schocken Books, 1971) - a book that can be found as a pdf online thanks to Vanderbilt University. The opening quotations at the top of this post are both taken from the latter edition, p. 468. 

 

[3] Kafka, 'The Cares of a Family Man', The Complete Stories, p. 469.

 

[4] Anya Meksin, 'Ragged Bits of Meaning, Wound on a Star-Shaped Spool for Thread', essay on Mauro Nervi's Kafka Project website: click here. Meksin's excellent essay is worth reading in full. 

 

[5] For those readers who are either too young or now too old and forgetful, the British milk company Unigate produced a series of TV ads in the 1970s featuring mysterious characters called Humphreys whose only visible presence was was a red-and-white striped straw. 

      The campaign, devised by John Webster, is best known for the slogan: "Watch out, watch out - there's a Humphrey about!" written and sung by musical genius and creator of the Wombles, Mike Batt. 

[6] Anya Meksin, 'Ragged Bits of Meaning, Wound on a Star-Shaped Spool for Thread' ... click here.

      I don't actually share Meksin's conclusion. Rather, like Camus, I don't see why suicide should be considered in the face of life's absurdity - for there is no more meaning in death than in life. And there's no reason either why a meaningless life should not be a happy and passionate one; the trick is to affirm the void and thereby consummate nihilism, as Nietzsche would say.    

 

 

Aujourd'hui, Maman est morte

Last photo of my mother on her 96th birthday 

(10 July 2022)

 

 

My mother died today. Unlike Meursault, however, I'm pretty certain of that. 

 

Because today also happens to be my birthday and I'm accepting her death as a kind of final gift: a chance to live again and re-enter the world from the same woman who bore me sixty years ago. 

 

Funny how, at such a time, one thinks of a short French novel published 80-odd years ago (L'Étranger) and of a fictional character indifferent in the face of death, or, perhaps more precisely, accepting of la tendre indifférence (or absurdity) of the universe in which life unfolds and then quickly closes.    

And funny how one also (rather shamefully) recalls the words written by Schopenhauer following the death of a Putzfrau to whom he had been paying a monthly sum by court order after an altercation in which she was injured: Obit anus, abit onus ('The old woman dies, the burden is lifted').

But mostly I just remember the final lovely smile my mother gave me as she found the strength to say my name one last time.

For a follow up post to this one, please click here. 

Don't It Make Your Blue Eyes Weep - A Guest Post by Simon Solomon

Police breach social gathering legislation to pollute lagoon at Harpur Hill, Buxton 

Photos: Sky News

The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion. - Albert Camus

In the febrile air of 1967/68 Paris, the Situationist International group planned a beautifully macabre stunt to protest the Vietnam war and épater les bourgeois by staining the Seine blood-red and depositing in it the corpses of a couple of hundred Asiatics to drift downstream to Notre Dame.

Reportedly, obtaining the cadavers was the easy part, courtesy of an enterprising plan to hijack a refrigerated truck en route to one of the city's medical schools that was said to do a brisk trade in Chinese dead bodies. However, the industrial dye proved a sticking point since the quantities were prohibitive. Thus, the plan sadly foundered, and the river herself remained artistically unperturbed. [1]

Fast forward to the viral madness of 2020 Blighty this week, when it has been depressing beyond belief to read of Derbyshire's Police's serial overreaches of the government's already draconian guidelines in locking down the entire nation - bar the odd permitted sortie to buy a pint of milk, stretch your legs or go to your job if you feel you must (and still have one) in order to, say, stay alive.

Taking as its departure point a spokesman's confidently philistine assertion that 'driving to beauty spots in the Peak District cannot be considered an essential journey', the constabulary has recently been keeping us safe by means of a catalogue of reassuring innovations - culminating in the reassuring use of drone surveillance to trace the car number plates of drivers back to Sheffield and subsequently name and shame on social media tweed-jacketed ramblers and old ladies with dogs. As Plod now extends its Orwellian arm to issue its wisdom concerning the dispensability of beauty for psychic health, God's green earth (beyond your own garden fence) is now - in its Cyclopian gaze - officially off limits. [2]

And so, building upon its blatant contempt for the necessity of beauty for anyone with half a soul or a breath of joy in their Covid 19-squeezed heart - and in a supremely dumb gesture strangely redolent of the French situationists (but without a soupçon of the spirit, wit and intelligence ) - the same force's recent desecration of a Buxton lagoon with a cheery black pigment at public expense has made good on its claim that communing with nature is to be outlawed, since the area (and doubtless any others it so decrees) is intrinsically 'dangerous'.

With this in mind, a surprisingly literate Facebook post on Buxton Police SNT reads, 'we have attended the location this morning and used water dye to make the water look less appealing.'

Difficult as it might seem for the rest of us to make this up, news reports state that the force has form in this domain, since the same tactic has been used in the past to reduce anti-social behaviour - such as children wading in the water or young people (whose risk of death from Corona virus is close to nil) admiring its turquoise tones in short sleeves. [3]

The former Supreme Court Justice Lord Sumption has lambasted the overreach in an extended public statement, the civil liberties group Big Brother Watch has dubbed the force's behaviour 'sinister' and 'counter-productive', and even the former Justice Secretary David Gauke has called matters 'badly misjudged', while local residents have themselves taken to social media, with one commenting: 'If only they were this authoritarian to people carrying zombie knives, stealing your car or grooming kids in Rotherham' - an item of customer feedback one wouldn't be surprised in the current climate to see earn its writer a court summons all by itself.

How best to respond to people who seemingly think aesthetics are a species of foreign head lice?

Clearly, the aforesaid pushback is pointless against those who clearly don't even have enough shame themselves to admit they are wrong (while seeking to shame others for such dangerous behaviour as going for a spin and a scenic stroll). We are ourselves at a loss, but would suggest that any remaining poets, anarchists and libertarians not yet criminalised in the Buxton area should band together under cover of nightfall, create a kindly cordon sanitare around the local cop shop, and throw a bucket of some suitably irremovable industrial dye of their own choosing over a few local officers. (In this venture, we suggest scarlet might be a colour of choice to leave the recipients suitably red-faced.)

As for the Blue Lagoon itself, by some accounts the water is barely more chemically benign than ammonia, contains dead animals, turds and needles, and is so cold it might (literally) drag you under at a stroke. There are a few sensible signs up, we gather, so that people can assess the risks for themselves like adults. Such excremental details, however, only make us love it all the more for its clearly Baudelairean allure to the local populace, and we look forward to looking in when time permits. 

Notes

[1] On the Situationist movement and fun and games on the Seine, see Christopher Gray (ed. and trans.), Leaving The 20th Century: The Incomplete Work of the Situationist International (Rebel Press, 1998). Thanks to Stephen Alexander for reminding me of this.

[2] Except it isn't! To see a summary of the correct and updated government/police powers (which allow one to drive and hike in the country with loved ones to one's heart's content), see https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/explainers-52106843.

[3] This is of course in no way to diminish the deaths of a small number of 'non-vulnerable' young and middle-aged people from Covid-19 in the UK in recent weeks.

Símón Solomon is a poet, translator, and critic. He is a professional member of the Irish Writers Centre, Dublin and currently serves as managing editor with the academic journal Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society. He can be contacted via simonsolomon.ink

Surprise musical bonus: click here. 

For a follow-up post to this one, click here.

On Textual Cruising (with Reference to the Case of Camus)

Photo of Albert Camus by Henri Cartier-Bresson (1944): 
with his upturned collar, cigarette, and slicked back hair, 
Camus embodied the essence of French cool in this period

One of the (many) ideas I've absorbed from Roland Barthes is that of textual cruising as a key component of the art (and erotics) of reading. 

To cruise the body of a text is both to slowly drift through it in an aimless but pleasurable manner and to make oneself sensitive to the play of signs and those few details, preferences, and inflections (what Barthes terms biographemes) that seem to reveal something of the author and "whose distinction and mobility might go beyond any fate and come to touch, like Epicurean atoms, some future body, destined to the same dispersion".*

I mention this, because I do often wonder not only about the (intertextual) relationship between written works, but also about the (homotextual) relationship between myself and those authors for whom I feel a good deal of affection and which is absolutely not based on any intellectual appeal.

Take Camus, for example. He's by no means a favourite writer and I have only a very casual relationship with his work. But I'm fond of him nevertheless, in a way I never could be about Sartre - monstrum in fronte, monstrum in animo - and it makes me wonder if it isn't simply due to the fact that Camus was so damn good-looking and his biographemes so seductive ...?**

* See: Roland Barthes, Sade, Fourier, Loyola, trans. Richard Miller, (University of California Press, 1989), p. 9.  

** I'm not simply trying to be funny here: one commentator recently described Camus as "the Don Draper of existentialism" and several others have remarked on his physical attractiveness and beautiful writing style. See Adam Gopnik, 'Facing History: Why We Love Camus' The New Yorker (April 2, 2012): click here to read online.

Carry On Caligula

Caligula (12-41 CE): 
Roman Emperor (37-41 CE) 

I have existed from the dawn of the world and I shall exist until the last star falls from the night sky. 

Although I have taken the form of a man, I am no man and every man and therefore a god.

I. Ecce Homo  

Although as a rule I'm not interested in sadistic megalomaniacs, I'm prepared to make an exception in the case of the Roman Emperor Gaius Julius Caesar - or, as he is more commonly known, Caligula (a childhood nickname meaning little boots that, not unreasonably, he came to hate).

For not only was he young, good looking and charismatic, but he also had a sense of humour that revealed a profound sense of the Absurd and it's this, arguably, along with his showmanship, that makes him feel more of a contemporary than his illustrious forebears, or even his nephew Nero.  

There are very few surviving firsthand accounts about Caligula's short period of rule - which, if we are to believe a recent documentary, consisted of 1400 Days of Terror* - so we don't really know if he was the cruel tyrant and sexually perverse sociopath he's portrayed in the 1934 novel I, Claudius, written by Robert Graves. 

But even if he was, I don't believe he was a madman, so much as a nihilist and ironist (though maybe not of the kind compatible with liberalism that Richard Rorty favours). The above quotation - which could've very easily come from Nietzsche's late work - is a good example of this. I don't think Caligula meant this to be taken literally; that he was self-creating and, indeed, self-mocking, rather than self-delusional.**         


II. Camus's Caligula  

It was undoubtedly the absurdist aspect of his reign and his character that attracted the French philosopher and writer Albert Camus to Caligula and, in 1944, he published a four-act play about him in which, following the death of his beloved sister Drusilla, the young emperor attempts to bring the impossible into the realm of the likely and thereby shatter the complacency of Roman life.

For Caligula - as imagined by Camus - the only point or pleasure of having power is to transgress all rational limits that would restrict its exercise and make the heavens themselves up for grabs (the play opens with Caligula desiring to take possession of the moon).   

The play was part of what Camus called his Cycle of the Absurd, which also included the novel L’Étranger (1942) and the long essay Le Mythe de Sisyphe (1942). All three works expand upon the idea that man's existence is meaningless because his life lacks external justification. In other words, the Absurd invariably manifests itself when humanity confronts the unreasonable silence of the void.

Discussing his play in 1957, Camus provided a fascinating outline of its theme:

"Caligula, a relatively kind prince so far, realizes on the death of Drusilla, his sister and his mistress, that 'men die and they are not happy.' Therefore, obsessed by the quest for the Absolute and poisoned by contempt and horror, he tries to exercise, through murder and systematic perversion of all values, a freedom which he discovers in the end is no good. He rejects friendship and love, simple human solidarity, good and evil. He takes the word of those around him, he forces them to logic, he levels all around him by force of his refusal and by the rage of destruction which drives his passion for life.

      But if his truth is to rebel against fate, his error is to deny men. One cannot destroy without destroying oneself. This is why Caligula depopulates the world around him and, true to his logic, makes arrangements to arm those who will eventually kill him. Caligula is the story of a superior suicide. It is the story of the most human and the most tragic of errors. Unfaithful to man, loyal to himself, Caligula consents to die for having understood that no one can save himself all alone and that one cannot be free in opposition to other men."

Reading this reminds one of why Sartre was right to suggest that existentialism - at least in the French understanding of this term - is a humanism ...

Notes

* Caligula: 1400 Days of Terror (2012), written and directed by Bruce Kennedy: click here to watch in full on YouTube

** In other words, whilst it's true that Caligula liked to refer to himself as a living god and insist his senators acknowledge (and worship) him as such, even this was done with atheistic delight and simply provided him with the opportunity to dress up in public as Apollo, Mercury, and, amusingly, Venus. 

See: Albert Camus, Caligula and Other Plays, (Penguin Books, 1984).

Reflections on the Death Mask (With Reference to the Case of L'Inconnue de la Seine)

 L'Inconnue de la Seine (c. late-1880s) 
A favourite pin-up of necrophiles

I. How Even the Dead Can Continue to Make an Impression

Napoleon, Nietzsche, Alfred Hitchcock, James Joyce, and Malcolm McLaren have at least one thing in common: they all left behind them a death mask, which, for those who don't know, is a post-mortem portrait sculpted from a wax or plaster impression made of an individual's face shortly after their passing (either with or without their permission).

Although such masks have a long tradition, I suspect that most modern people find them a bit creepy and would happily consign them to some dark corner of the uncanny valley out of sight. But, even today, we find them displayed in libraries, museums, and art galleries.

Dead kings, politicians, philosophers, poets, and even notorious outlaws including Ned Kelly, have all been commemorated in this manner. One of the most famous death masks, however, is that of an unidentified teenage girl known as L'Inconnue de la Seine ...


II. The Unknown Woman of the Seine

At the end of the 19th century, the mask of a pretty young suicide fished out of the Seine became a must-have fixture on the walls of fashionable people's homes and inspired numerous literary works. The story goes that a pathologist working at the Paris Morgue was so enchanted by her serene beauty that he felt compelled to immortalise her features.  

Rilke and, later, Albert Camus both compared her eerily joyful expression to the enigmatic smile of the Mona Lisa, whilst, in The Savage God (1972), Al Alvarez notes that L'Inconnue was the erotic ideal for an entire generation of girls in the pre-War period who morbidly based their look on hers.

And, amusingly, the face of the world's first CPR training mannequin - known as Resusci Anne and designed by a Norwegian toy maker - was modelled after this unknown adolescent corpse (thus adding a darkly perverse element to the already slightly queer act of administering the kiss of life to a rubber doll).


Note: 

Anyone interested in having a death mask - or a memorial sculpture - made of themselves or a loved one (which can be cast in a variety of materials, including marble and bronze), should contact the British sculptor Nick Reynolds, who is renowned for his work in this field and has produced masks of, amongst others, the film director Ken Russell, actor Peter O'Toole, and his own father, Bruce Reynolds, mastermind of the Great Train Robbery: click here. 

No Man is a Hypocrite in His Pleasures: The Crazy Love Life of Albert Camus

Simone                                                 Maria                                                    Francine

Football-loving, sun-worshipping, French philosopher and novelist Albert Camus, was an absurdly stylish and good-looking man who always had an eye for the ladies ...

In 1934, whilst still a student at the University of Algiers and working odd jobs to make some money, he tied the knot with Simone Hié, daughter of a wealthy eye doctor. Sadly, things didn't turn out for the best. Mutual infidelity and an increasingly serious drug habit on her side meant that the marriage failed within just a couple of years.

Camus then married the very talented and very striking pianist and mathematician Francine Faure, in 1940. She bore him twins five years later and the marriage lasted until his fatal car crash in 1960, despite Camus's numerous affairs, including - most significantly - his obsessive, on-off relationship with the distinguished stage and screen actress Maria Casares.       

The Fall (1956), described by Sartre as perhaps the most beautiful and least understood of Camus's works, is the confession of a successful and celebrated man brought to a point of emotional and intellectual crisis when he fails to come to the aid of a drowning woman. If the former is a self-portrait, then the latter is poor Francine, who overlooked her husband's constant womanising and allowed him his erotic freedom for many years until, finally, this gentle, kind-hearted woman cracked and suffered a severe mental breakdown.

Not only was Francine hospitalised and subjected to electroshock therapy, but she also attempted suicide. Her depression grew so severe that she would withdraw from the world for prolonged periods, staring straight ahead whilst endlessly repeating the name Maria Casares. Doubtless, her mental fragility had several causes, but the pain and humiliation she experienced due to Camus's open infidelity can't have helped.    

In a letter written shortly after he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature (1957), Camus claimed that he had never stopped loving Francine - albeit in his own admittedly shitty manner. He also claimed that she had forgiven him. I don't know if that's true, but, after her death in 1979, Francine was buried with her husband in Lourmarin - where they had spent an idyllic last summer together twenty years earlier - in a tomb surrounded by flowers. 

Not that Camus had changed his libidinous ways following Francine's breakdown. Indeed, in the last days of his life he was still sending passionate love letters to at least four mistresses, including Maria Casares, who, arguably, was the only woman Camus truly respected as an equal and to whom he felt tied by the bonds of the earth, by intelligence, by heart and flesh.


Afternote 

The daughter of a wealthy Spanish Republican, Maria Casares was an extraordinary woman, fully capable as one commentator has written of playing Don Juana to Camus's Don Juan, though often resentful of the fact that he refused to leave his wife and children for her. Casares discussed her often stormy sixteen-year relationship with Camus in her 1980 autobiography Résidente privilégiée. 

Readers may also be interested to know that 860 of the letters exchanged between Camus and Casares (his petite mouette) have recently been published in a lengthy volume entitled Correspondance, ed. Béatrice Vaillant (Editions Gallimard, 2017). In her introduction to the book, Catherine Camus writes that these letters not only make the world a bigger and brighter place, but demonstrate that beyond absurdity and revolt ... lies love.   

The Case of Evelyn McHale (The Most Beautiful Suicide in the World)

Photo of Evelyn McHale, by Robert C. Wiles. 

For poets, there is nothing more romantic than the suicide of someone young; particularly if they take their lives with an element of style and manage to leave behind them a good-looking corpse. And no one has managed to achieve this feat with more success than an attractive, twenty-three year old bookkeeper, called Evelyn McHale, in 1947.

Hers is often described as the most beautiful suicide in the world and I’m happy to share this view. What makes her case so magnificent and not merely tragic (or mundane), are the following six points:

1. She chose a magical date, May 1st, an ancient spring festival, on which to make her self-sacrifice, thereby lending her death a certain mythical aspect or celebratory pagan splendour.

2. She chose the right method for her location. When in Berlin, for example, one should swallow poison or use a gun; in London, it’s appropriate to throw oneself from a bridge into the Thames, or onto the tracks of the Underground before an approaching train. But, as Serge Gainsbourg observed, New York is all about the astonishing height of its buildings. And so, when in NYC, one simply has to jump.

3. Having chosen, rightly, to jump, Evelyn then selected one of the two truly great and truly iconic modern structures from which to leap: the Empire State Building. This 102-story skyscraper, located in Midtown Manhattan, is, with its beautiful art deco design, the perfect place from which to fall to one’s death and since its opening in 1931 only a select number of lucky souls have had the privilege (and fatal pleasure) of plunging from this iconic site.

4. She was impeccably dressed for the occasion, with gloves and a simple, but elegant, pearl necklace. Before jumping she calmly removed her coat and neatly folded it over the wall of the 86th floor observation deck. She also left behind her a make-up kit, some family snaps, and a suicide note written in a black pocketbook, in which she asked to be cremated without any kind of fuss or service of remembrance. In other words, even in death, Evelyn kept her composure - which brings us to our fifth point:

5. She didn’t land with an undignified splat on the pavement of 34th Street; but, rather, with a crash onto the roof of a waiting car. And it wasn't just any old car - it was a UN Assembly limousine, as if she wanted to make an impression on the entire world. And impression, as we see from the photo above, is the key word here. For Evelyn literally impressed herself into the roof of the Cadillac, so that it seemed to fold round her, with metallic tenderness. There is almost nothing to suggest the terrible violence of the scene - apart from the ripped stockings and the absence of shoes.

6. She conspired with fate to ensure there was a photographer nearby to instantly capture the event of her death on film; thereby ensuring her place within the cultural imagination. Indeed, fifteen years later, Andy Warhol would incorporate her image into his work, just as he did images of other beautiful women, including Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor.

As for the student photographer, Robert C. Wiles, he also struck it lucky that day; his astonishing photo of Evelyn was published in Life Magazine as a full-page 'Picture of the Week' in the May 12 issue. It was his first - and last - photo ever to be published and one likes to imagine he hung his camera up after taking this perfect shot, but I don't know if this is true or not.

I'll stop here - but I could of course talk about (and darkly caress) this topic forever. For Camus was right: there is only one truly serious philosophical question - and that is the question of suicide.