If you go to New York, chances are that you will read the New York Times, that is to say one of the most overrated papers on earth. But don’t miss its truly great page: the Obituaries. It’s the only section I read every day, because I admire the intention that animates it: to remember. And to do so on a large scale, five, six, eight short biographies per day. Compared to Italian newspapers, which devote a very large space to very few people, the Obits have an open, ‘democratic’ feel: lots of people, of many kinds, and most of them not at all famous. Reading their stories, you are reminded that society is made of different worlds and temporalities: where the 36-year-old choreographer who has just put on his first Broadway show appears next to the 101-year-old man who had fought in ‘Palestine’, against the Turks, in the Jewish battalion of the British army.
What is it that survives then, and makes a life worth remembering? What human beings have done—and no one had done before. Which can mean the most disparate things: in the one random month I decided to scan, it ranged from the creation of the New York Metropolitan Transit Authority to discoveries in the field of neuro-muscular dysfunctions; the invention of the Ajax detergent at Palmolive and the institution of mandatory Art courses at Columbia University; euthanasia, the first American ascent of Mount Everest, and mutual funds; a genetic mutation related to diabetes, the concession of interest on bank accounts, the Goodwill Games, or winning fifty-five million dollars at the Florida lottery (and giving them all to charity).
Lots of things. Strange, at times; but all of them truly ‘things’. In this page of the dead the air is incredibly concrete—prosaic, even. All facts: of Sheelah Ryan (the lottery winner), we are told what Foundation she created, how its payments are conducted, the name of its director—all the way to the perhaps unavoidable stray cats. We are given the street, the civic number, and the crossroad of every house built in Manhattan by the real estate developer Joseph Blitz. And of Archer Gordon (who joined mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and cardiac massage), we are told about the manikins he constructed with the Norwegian doll-maker, Asmund Laerdul, for use in medical training.