Somehow A Past

And unfolds his life largely through a chain of personal encounters. His traffic with such major literary and artistic figures as Alfred Stieglitz, Vasily Kandinsky, Gertrude Stein, Mable Dodge Luhan, Eugene O'Neill, Robert McAlmon, and Charles Demuth is recorded, as are his travels both domestic and foreign.

Reproduction of the original: Somehow Good by William De Morgan

This is a collection of some of the fantastic stories inspired by the authors experiences living in a big and unique city presented now throughout adventures that reflect a life full of bizarre excitement; sometimes with a funny development, others with moments of anguish, and some others with unexpected twists towards sadness or horror.

“We have passed through the eye of the needle!” my father was fond of saying. And indeed we had. Now, after four years and four months of German occupation, we had survived. Neither morality nor faith had anything to do with our survival but survive we did. Money, sex and luck all had a hand in it. Germany, the most powerful nation in Europe, had decreed that all Jews were to be exterminated, not only the adults but especially the children. Once the children had been murdered, the “Jewish Question” would have been resolved once and for all. The Allied armies had finally swept through Belgium and liberated us after we had spent twenty-seven months in hiding. Our parents, Hilaire and Frieda Rosenberg went about trying to resume some semblance of family life; my sister Ruth and I would be going back to school after nearly three years of interrupted studies. It would take years for me to fathom the enormity of what we had been through, to understand why we did survive. Our parents were gamblers and people they knew through the Casinos hid us. Hilaire made large amounts of money in black-market dealings with the Germans so we could pay for the cupidity of those who would hide us. Frieda had an affair with an SS officer who warned us when we had to go into hiding. After attending the 1991 Conference of Hidden Children in New York City I knew that this unusual story of survival had to be written. Thus began a journey to a second liberation, an understanding that although they had been less than perfect parents, Hilaire and Frieda did all they humanly could do to ensure the survival of this nucleus of our family.

Death has long been a pre-occupation of philosophers, and this is especially so today. The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Death collects 21 newly commissioned essays that cover current philosophical thinking of death-related topics across the entire range of the discipline. These include metaphysical topics--such as the nature of death, the possibility of an afterlife, the nature of persons, and how our thinking about time affects what we think about death--as well as axiological topics, such as whether death is bad for its victim, what makes it bad to die, what attitude it is fitting to take towards death, the possibility of posthumous harm, and the desirability of immortality. The contributors also explore the views of ancient philosophers such as Aristotle, Plato and Epicurus on topics related to the philosophy of death, and questions in normative ethics, such as what makes killing wrong when it is wrong, and whether it is wrong to kill fetuses, non-human animals, combatants in war, and convicted murderers. With chapters written by a wide range of experts in metaphysics, ethics, and conceptual analysis, and designed to give the reader a comprehensive view of recent developments in the philosophical study of death, this Handbook will appeal to a broad audience in philosophy, particularly in ethics and metaphysics.

Old age is a time of losses- permanent, cumulative and irreversible. These losses include our loss of work in retirement, the eclipse of our past, our biological decline, dependency resulting from such decline, the foreshortening of our future, the abandonment of belief in our own improvement and our society’s progress, and, of course, our death. This book views these losses as part of an elegy of old age. Elegy is a poetic or prose mourning of loss. Sadness and other emotions result. With elegiac understanding we detach ourselves from these losses to seek and find consolation. This book is concerned with achieving intellectual detachment through meditative reflection with the help of reading and appreciating the classics. The final stage of the old age elegy- consolation can be found, at least in part, within the classics-“the garlands of repose”. The classics are broadly defined by Matthew Arnold as: “the best that [has} been thought and said: { or found in the fine arts}. To benefit from the classis requires a life-long liberal education. This education begins with an introduction to the classics in youth, makes use of them during our adult lives, and supplies their conclusion for old age meditation. Such significant works enable us to place the losses we suffer within an intellectual framework of perennial ideas. It is by means of such an intellectual framework that we secure consolation in old age. Classic works familiarize us deeply with the losses and emotions we endure-suggest substitutes for the goods of the life we have lost in old age, offer opportunities of catharsis for the sadness we experience and help us transform ourselves in old age. Classics help us see old age and its losses as part of a complete life which hold a unique value of its own, while remaining part of larger nature processes, history and intellectual traditions.