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ONE
EXISTENTIALISM

BEAT
AND THE GIFT

MORE
O F M O RTA L I T Y

KEVIN AHO
One Beat More
One Beat More
Existentialism and the
Gift of Mortality

Kevin Aho

polity
Copyright © Kevin Aho 2022

The right of Kevin Aho to be identified as Author of this Work has been
asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act
1988.

First published in 2022 by Polity Press

Polity Press
65 Bridge Street
Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press
101 Station Landing
Suite 300
Medford, MA 02155, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the
purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be
reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by
any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise,
without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4689-3
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4690-9(pb)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021945096

Typeset in 11 on 12pt Sabon

by Cheshire Typesetting Ltd, Cuddington, Cheshire
Printed and bound in the UK by TJ International Limited

The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for
external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time
of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the
websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the
content is or will remain appropriate.

Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have
been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary
credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.

For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com

Die while you’re alive, and be absolutely dead. Then do
whatever you want: it’s all good.
Shidō Bunan (1603–1676)
 Contents

Acknowledgments viii

Introduction: To Learn How to Die 1

1 Death-­Man 13
2 Letting Go 27
3 A Chasm of Stillness 42
4 The World Has Become Smaller 55
5 Be the Poet of Your Life 69
6 The World in All Its Terror 84
7 This Life Countless Times 99
8 Held Out into Nothing 112

Appendix: The Existentialists127

Notes136
Bibliography160
Index173

vii
 Acknowledgments

First off, I want to express my gratitude to the doc-

tors and nurses who saved my life and took care of
me as I recovered at the Gulf Coast Medical Center
in Fort Myers, Florida. I am singularly grateful to my
cardiologist, Nemalan Selveraj, and to my primary care
physician, Shaila Hegde, both of whom embody a rare
dedication to the healing arts and an extraordinary
capacity for empathy. I also want to pay tribute to the
amazing group of nurses at the Institute for Hermeneutic
Phenomenology at the University of Buffalo’s College of
Nursing. Among this group, I am especially thankful
to Annie Vandermause and Suzanne Dickerson, whose
friendship and support have been invaluable to me. And
there are a number of philosophers, medical humanists,
and scholars whose work inspired me and helped guide
this project along, including Havi Carel, Arthur Frank,
Joseph Davis, Gordon Marino, Drew Leder, Nicole
Piemonte, Richard Polt, Fredrik Svenaeus, and the late
Charles Guignon.
The initial ideas for this book came about in the
weeks and months that followed my heart attack in

viii
 Acknowledgments

December 2017. In an effort to make sense of my col-

lapsing world, I worked on a couple of essays. The first
was a short narrative of the experience, “Notes from a
Heart Attack: A Phenomenology of an Altered Body,”
later published in the collection Phenomenology of the
Broken Body, edited by Espen Dahl, Cassandra Falke,
and Thor Eirik Eriksen (London: Routledge, 2019).
At around the same time, the sociologist Joseph Davis
reached out and invited me to a conference on the ethics
of aging held at the Institute for Advanced Studies in
Culture at the University of Virginia. I was too anxious
and weak to travel at the time but managed to write
a paper for the event: “The Contraction of Time and
Existential Awakening: A Phenomenology of Authentic
Aging.” The conference papers were published in the
collection The Evening of Life: The Challenges of Aging
and Dying Well (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre
Dame Press, 2020). I am grateful to the editors of these
two collections and to Routledge and the University of
Notre Dame Press for permission to reprint portions of
these chapters.
The excellent editorial team at Polity has once again
exceeded all my expectations. I am deeply grateful to
my commissioning editor, Pascal Porcheron, who was
an early champion of the project and encouraged me to
make the book more personal, in an effort to disclose
more of my own emotional and philosophical struggles.
He went through the entire manuscript line by line,
offering valuable feedback and commentary throughout.
And Manuela Tecusan’s masterful copyediting greatly
improved the writing and corrected countless syntactical
blunders. I am also grateful to two anonymous review-
ers for their critical feedback and recommendations.

ix
 Acknowledgments

I also want to thank my loving partner, Jane Kayser,

who was with me for the entire journey and offered
unwavering support and encouragement as she listened
to me read aloud from early chapters of the book. But,
more than anyone, I am thankful to my parents, Jim and
Margaret Aho. In the autumn of their own lives, they
have taught me what it means to face up to mortality
and to live with a sense of awe, gratitude, and joy. This
book is dedicated to them.

x
 Introduction
To Learn How to Die

It was a beautiful, sun-­dappled December morning in

south Florida. The sky was blue, the humidity low,
and there was not a breath of wind as I began my bike
ride through leafy neighborhoods in Naples, Bonita
Springs, and Fort Myers. Three-­and-­a-half hours and
sixty miles later, I was pedaling over the Estero Bridge
toward my house and was suddenly overcome with
nausea and lightheadedness. I squeezed the brakes,
threw my bike to the ground, and vomited all over the
street. Confused and thinking I had food poisoning or
simply overdid it on the ride, I slowly rode back home.
Then the chest pain came as a dull, persistent ache.
I called my girlfriend, telling her that I was having
some trouble. She said it sounded like I was having a
heart attack. I dismissed it. “No, I’m just hungry and
dehydrated and need to take a shower.” She raced
to my house and convinced me to go to the hospital
as the dizziness deepened. After a quick ECG in the
emergency room, I was ushered into a suite of scurry-
ing doctors and nurses who were already preparing the
surgery. All I heard above the din was, “Massive heart

1
 One Beat More

­ttack . . . ­Widowmaker . . . LAD ­blocked . . . ­LAD

a
blocked!”
A week after my heart attack was Christmas Day, and
I was deeply shaken as I began to take the first tentative
steps back into my life. I wanted to begin the day with
a slow stroll around the block, but only got to the end
of the driveway. My right calf felt tight and achy and
my toes were numb. I came back to the house with a
grim face: “Something’s wrong.” My girlfriend rushed
me back to the hospital, where I received an ultrasound
on my leg and, sure enough, a dangerous blood clot was
found in my femoral artery. There were multiple days of
treatment with a vascular surgeon, angiograms to exam-
ine the clot, and various tubes inserted through my left
groin down to my right calf. (The right groin couldn’t
be used, as this was the side that they had gone up in
order to place the stent in my heart.) The surgeon was
unable to remove the clot, so he opted for an aggressive
intravenous clot buster treatment combined with high
doses of blood thinners. I was unable to eat or stand for
three days. Every hour, nurses would measure the size of
my calf to see if blood was flowing, and each hour I was
gripped by terror that the clot was getting larger or the
pulse in my right foot was getting weaker. Each night
was a din of buzzers, beeps, blood tests, and vital sign
checks. I slept in fits and starts.
I was finally released from intensive care after the clot
buster medication had done its work, and I was able to
move to my own hospital room for observation. The
diagnosis was that a clot in my heart had been discharged
during the heart attack, and that I would need to be on
a battery of blood thinners to prevent future clots from
forming. On the second night of observation, an alarm

2
 Introduction: To Learn How to Die

and flashing red light erupted from the heart monitor

that hung on the wall; it signalled a thirty-­second burst
of ventricular tachycardia. The next morning my cardi-
ologist warned me that I had experienced a potentially
deadly arrhythmia, which made me vulnerable to what
he called “sudden cardiac death.” The solution was to
wear a portable heart defibrillator (or “life vest”) for the
next few months, as the clot dissolved, and then decide
whether or not to implant an electronic defibrillator in
my chest.
The combined effect of these events left me shattered.
I was only forty-­eight years old but suddenly felt old
and frail. Ordinary tasks such as walking up the stairs
or getting out of the car left me exhausted and out of
breath. My future, once open and expansive with pos-
sibilities, had collapsed. And the interpretation I had of
myself as a healthy and energetic college professor fell to
pieces. I felt trapped in a meaningless present, left to the
moment-­to-­moment rituals of taking medication, check-
ing my blood pressure and pulse, and arranging the
next doctor visit. I was suddenly forced to confront the
existential questions I had spent so many years teaching
and writing about, “Who am I?” and “What is the
meaning of my life?” Indeed, the ideas of existential-
ism, that distinctive brand of European philosophy that
exploded on the scene in mid-­twentieth-­century France,
became an obsession for me as I convalesced at home,
frightened and vulnerable. Its focus on the flesh-­and-­
blood experiences of the individual, its emphasis on
being authentic and honest about our condition, and
its engagement with the ultimate questions of human
existence, of the meaning of life and death, were more
pressing and vital to me than ever. And I began to see

3
 One Beat More

the ideas of e­ xistentialism being played out in real life in

my biweekly sessions of cardiac rehab.
Here nurses would put a group of heart attack sur-
vivors on treadmills and rowing machines and gently
encourage us to exercise for thirty minutes while care-
fully monitoring our heart rate and blood pressure. I
was at least twenty years younger than anyone else in
the room, and over the course of these sessions I began
to talk with and learn from my elders. What struck me
initially was how differently they seemed to interpret
the experience of their failing bodies. Whereas I was
gripped by dread and was hypervigilant about every
skipped heartbeat and flashing pain in my chest, they
appeared far less shaken. They spoke of the importance
of not worrying about things you can’t control, about
letting go and taking pleasure in little things. There was
an elderly woman, Beverly, who appeared to sense my
distress. She sat next to me at the end of one of my final
sessions and said: “As you get older, Kevin, these kinds
of things just get easier to accept. I can’t explain it.” Her
words were strange, but they comforted me. Here, in a
cardiac rehab clinic, I seemed to be surrounded by folks
who already embodied a kind of existential wisdom.
Whereas I was riddled with despair, they seemed clear-­
sighted about their condition, talked openly about their
physical pain and losses, and appeared calmer and
more sanguine in the face of mortality. Their weakened
and frail bodies reminded me of death, but their atti-
tudes seemed freer to me, more life-­affirming. I began
to think that maybe there was something about grow-
ing old that can make us more honest and accepting
about who we are, something that can help us place
our everyday worries in a proper perspective, and that

4
 Introduction: To Learn How to Die

maybe we become more like the existentialists as we get

older.
As I began to do more research on the wisdom that
comes with growing old, this suspicion grew stronger.
A key moment occurred when I happened across a
remarkable series of articles in the New York Times by
journalist John Leland, who had spent a year closely
documenting the lives of six ordinary New Yorkers
from diverse backgrounds who were all members of the
“oldest old,” that is, eighty-­five years and up. Leland’s
series was later published as a book, titled Happiness
Is a Choice You Make: Lessons from a Year among
the Oldest Old, and in its pages the reader is intro-
duced to elders who struggled with painful illnesses,
loss, and bodily diminishment but who nonetheless
lived with a marked sense of purpose and joy. Like
Beverly, who consoled me at cardiac rehab, these elders
weren’t dwelling on their losses or missed opportuni-
ties, nor were they overly anxious about the nearness
of their own death. Indeed, they all seemed to shatter
the ageist stereotypes I had grown accustomed to. Fred,
for example, an eighty-­seven-­year-­old African American
and World War II veteran with debilitating heart disease
whom Leland became especially fond of in the course
of his research, accepted his bodily limitations and the
proximity of death with a kind of ease and lightness. He
embraced his age and savored each moment as it came
with a clear knowledge that his time was short. Leland
was struck by how Fred didn’t look backward with
regret or forward with anticipation. He existed in the
present. When he asked when the happiest period of his
life was, Fred replied without hesitation, “Right now.”1
Fred was what the German philosopher Friedrich

5
 One Beat More

Nietzsche would have called a “yes-­ sayer,” someone

who embraces and affirms life as a whole, and all the
gifts and losses and delights and pains that come with
it. Fred wasn’t overly depressed and wallowing in the
loss of his physical strength, his mental sharpness, or his
friends and lovers. He embodied the Nietzschean princi-
ple of amor fati: he loved his fate and was overflowing
with life right up until the end.2
To those already familiar with existentialism, it might
seem odd to apply this particular brand of philosophy
to the phenomenon of aging. We tend to associate “the
existentialist” with the commitments of youth, of doing
rather than being, of embracing freedom and rebel-
lion against bourgeois conformism, moral absolutes,
and metaphysical security. This figure is often viewed
as the embodiment of vitality, courage, and agency,
qualities that emerge in the heroic archetype of what
the French existentialist Albert Camus branded “the
rebel” (l’homme révolté). The rebel is the incarnation
of “unbounded freedom,” someone who is “born of
abundance and fullness of spirit” and actively embraces
“all that is problematic and strange in our existence.”3
Wearing his signature black sweater and black pants
and perhaps smoking a Gauloise cigarette in a Parisian
café, he presents a dashing figure, passionate, creative,
and wholly engaged in the world. It’s no surprise, then,
that the weaknesses and vulnerabilities of old age are
rarely discussed. Indeed, the only major figure who
seriously explores the issue of aging is the French phi-
losopher Simone de Beauvoir, in her work The Coming
of Age—a massive tome that paints an especially bleak
picture of older persons as beings scorned by society,
trapped in their bodies, and largely stripped of any kind

6
 Introduction: To Learn How to Die

of meaningful agency. But existentialism is not just a

philosophy for the young and healthy. Indeed, the core
aim of this short book is to show that existentialism is
perhaps most applicable to our later years, as we strug-
gle with illness, physical limitations, the stigmas of our
ageist society, and the imminence of death. In fact the
true rebel may well be the octogenarian in a wheelchair
or a nursing home, not the twenty-­year-­old nihilist who
is drawn to the radical ideas of existentialism but has
not yet had to confront the painful realities of life. As
the German language poet Rainer Maria Rilke said,
the twenty-­year-­old may grasp the existential questions
intellectually, but without the nearness of death and a
deep reservoir of life experience to draw from, he or she
has not yet learned how to “live the questions.”4
But what exactly are these questions? It is difficult
to answer because the word “existentialism” does
not refer to a unified movement or school of thought.
There are philosophical and literary existentialists; there
are existentialists who believe in God and others, like
Nietzsche, who espouse the idea of God’s death; and
there are some who believe in the existence of free will
and others who think that this idea is a moral fiction.
Indeed, the term wasn’t coined until 1943, long after the
nineteenth-­century Danish pioneer Søren Kierkegaard
laid the conceptual groundwork for it. And of all the
major twentieth-­century players, only Beauvoir and her
compatriot and partner Jean-­Paul Sartre self-­identified
as existentialists. Other like-­ minded contemporaries
disavowed the label for various reasons. Yet for all these
disjointed views, there is nonetheless a common set of
core principles that binds this diverse group of philoso-
phers and writers together.

7
 One Beat More

The first principle of existentialism is perhaps best

captured by Sartre’s maxim that “existence precedes
essence.” This pithy adage suggests that humans are
distinct from other creatures in the sense that there is no
fixed or pre-­given “essence” that ultimately determines
or makes us who we are. Humans are self-­creating or
self-­making beings. Unlike my cat, I am not wholly
determined by my instincts. I have the capacity to con-
figure my existence through my own situated choices
and actions. There is, for this reason, no definitive or
complete account of who I am. No matter how old I
am, I can always remake or reinterpret myself right
up until the moment of death. Existence, then, is not
a static thing; it is a dynamic process of becoming, of
realizing who we are as we move through the stages of
our lives. The existentialist, of course, isn’t denying that
our inherited compulsions, our physical bodies, and
our environmental circumstances limit and constrain
us in certain ways. He or she is suggesting, rather, that
we are not trapped or determined by these constraints
and that what distinguishes us as self-­conscious beings
is our ability to care for, to reflect on, and to worry
about our compulsions, our bodies, and our circum-
stances, to relate to them and give them meaning. This
is why humans are, as Kierkegaard puts it, “a relation
that relates to itself.”5 Our ability to relate to our-
selves manifests itself in how we choose to interpret
and make sense of the limitations and opportunities
brought forth by the situation we’ve been thrown into.
The fact that we are free to choose and create our
existence in this way is what the existentialist means by
“transcendence.”
But, insofar as I am self-­conscious, I am also painfully

8
 Introduction: To Learn How to Die

aware that I did not choose to be born and that my

being is always threatened by the possibility of non-­
being, by death. This leads to the second principle of
existentialism, that the truth of our condition is revealed
to us not by means of reason or philosophical reflection
but by our emotions and our capacity to feel. When
existentialists refer to feelings of “nausea,” “anxiety,”
and “dread,” they are trying to capture the gnawing
and inchoate sense we have that there is something
wrong with us, that there is nothing that ultimately
grounds or secures our lives, that there is no reason
for us to be at all. Of course, the existentialist also
understands that we spend much of our lives fleeing
from this painful awareness. We cling to our comfort-
able routines and social roles; we distract ourselves with
gossip and we numb ourselves with intoxicants, soft
addictions, and fantasies of an afterlife, all in an effort
to escape the feeling of our own groundlessness. But
the existentialist makes it clear that the anguish we
feel is not something we should recoil from, because it
teaches us basic truths about who we are: it teaches us
that we are temporal creatures, that our existence is in
fact precarious, ambiguous, and uncertain. Understood
this way, these unsettling feelings present opportunities
for personal growth and transformation; they have the
power to shake us out of self-­deception and compla-
cency, reminding us of what is truly at stake in our brief
and precious lives.
And this leads to the third principle of existentialism,
that the primary aim of existence is not to experience
pleasure or material success. It isn’t even to be happy or
to be a good person. The aim, rather, is to be authentic,
to be true to oneself. This means that I should not just

9
 One Beat More

conform, or try to fit in with the socially prescribed

roles and values of the day. I should commit to the
values that give my life meaning and that matter to me
as the unique individual that I am. But one of the keys
to being true to oneself is to first recognize that there is
no stable self or “I” to begin with, that the very idea,
in Nietzsche’s words, of an enduring self “is a fiction”:
one’s self “does not exist at all.”6 The first step on the
path toward authenticity, then, is to be open and honest
with ourselves about our own protean nature and the
ambiguity of our condition.
In this book I put forth the idea that it is often easier
to be inauthentic and to live in a state of self-­deception
when we’re young and healthy. Brimming with strength
and vitality and facing a future wide open to possi-
bilities, we feel secure and invulnerable, as if death
wouldn’t apply to us. But, as we move into old age,
it becomes increasingly difficult to live in denial. The
reality of finitude presses in on us every day as our
bodies weaken, as illness overtakes us, as friends and
family members die. For the older person, as Beauvoir
reminds us, “death is no longer a general, abstract fate:
it is a personal event, an event that is near at hand.”7 I
want to suggest that growing old may actually push us
in the direction of authenticity, of facing and accepting
the frailty of our existence, and in this way makes it
possible to live with a renewed sense of urgency and
purpose.
Of course, it is also important not to romanticize
the aging process. It is filled with meaningless suffering
and loss; it can leave us feeling abandoned, crippled by
depression and filled with anger. But the point of this
book is to unsettle the common view in our society that

10
 Introduction: To Learn How to Die

old age is some sort of wasting malady or affliction.

As American psychologist James Hillman points out,
the original meaning of the word “old” has nothing
to do with deterioration and decline; it is formed on
an Indo-­European root that meant “to nourish” and
“to be mature”—the same root we find in the Latin
alere (“to feed, rear, nourish, nurse”) and alimentum
(“nourishment”). To be old, in this light, is to be “fully
nourished, grown up, and mature.”8 This may be why
the elderly patients in my cardiac rehab appeared to be
so different from me. Whereas I was panicked at the
thought of coming face to face with death, they were
more composed and mature. Nourished by their vast
life experience, they seemed better prepared to integrate
and accept death into their lives and cherish the limited
time they had left.
In the following chapters I try to shed light on a
simple idea: that our life is not diminished but enhanced
when we are honest and accepting of ourselves as aging
and dying. When Rilke refers to the “masterpiece of
a long-­ripened death,” he is pointing out the ways in
which growing old can nourish us by releasing us from
habituated patterns of self-­deception and from the anxi-
eties of denial and can help us come to an awareness of
what genuinely matters in our lives. Aging, understood
this way, is a long and slow instruction that teaches
us the most important lesson: “to learn how to die,”
how to recognize that the future is an illusion and that
all that exists is the beauty and mystery of the present
moment, a moment we all too often take for granted in
the harried rush of youth and middle age.9 The autumn
of life, then, can be viewed not just as a time of physical
decline and infirmity but as one of existential renewal

11
 One Beat More

and awakening, a time that allows us to experience

what Rilke calls “the ripe fruit of the here and now
that has been seized and bitten into and will spread its
indescribable taste to us.”10

12
 1
Death-­Man

To see yourself is to die, to die to all illusions.

Søren Kierkegaard

In his classic analysis of the concept of death in children,

existential psychotherapist Irvin Yalom describes how
youngsters protect themselves by anthropomorphizing
death, treating it as if it were something separate from
them and giving it a skeletal and ghostly human form. In
a conversation with a therapist, Bobby, a four-­year-­old,
says:
[B.] Death does wrong.
[T.] How does it do wrong?
[B.] Stabs you to death with a knife.
[T.] What is death?
[B.] A man.
[T.] What sort of man?
[B.] Death-­man.
[T.] How do you know?
[B.] I saw him.1

For the existentialist, our childhood fears of “death-­

man” persist deep into adulthood. Death-­ man is

13
 One Beat More

deteriorating; he is disabled, thin, and frail; he has

translucent skin, yellowed and missing teeth, and a stale
smell. We don’t want to be near death-­man because he
reminds us of where we are heading. When I was in car-
diac rehab I saw many incarnations of death-­man, and
they terrified me. It was inconceivable that I was like
them. But, back on campus a few weeks later, I realized
that I was death-­man. Although the external defibrillator
I was wearing after my heart attack to protect me from
cardiac arrest was largely concealed under my shirt, it
was attached to a camera-­sized box at my hip, with a
black cord running up my side. It was unmistakably
a medical device, and I felt the stigma. I was branded.
When colleagues approached me, they would glance
uneasily at the device and look at me with concern.
What was especially disturbing is that some whom I
considered close friends avoided me altogether or would
simply smile and scurry away, uncomfortable with what
I represented: shattered health, vulnerability, a reminder
of death. These jarring experiences forced me to reflect
on my obsession with youth, beauty, and strength and
my negative views of old age and consider the fact that
the pervasiveness of ageism in our culture may manifest
itself unconsciously, as a way for us to protect ourselves
from the awareness of our own mortality.
The ways in which we belittle and debase the elderly in
contemporary society are shocking, especially consider-
ing that, at least in the United States, the fastest growing
age group is made up of eighty-­five- to ninety-­four-­year-­
olds.2 The toxicity of ageism has become acutely visible
during the coronavirus pandemic. We have witnessed
a remarkably callous attitude toward older persons, as
if their lives no longer had any productive value. The

14
 Death-Man

United Kingdom’s former political strategist Dominic

Cummings remarked that the primary goal of the coun-
try’s response to the pandemic was to achieve “herd
immunity, [to] protect the economy, and if that means
some pensioners die, too bad.”3 And Dan Patrick, lieu-
tenant governor of Texas, came under fire for claiming on
a nightly news broadcast that, because older persons are
no longer contributing members of society, they should
be willing to sacrifice their lives for the sake of reopen-
ing the economy.4 These views reflect an attitude that
conveys the impression that older persons are neither
admired nor respected; they are expendable. And this
attitude has become so normalized that it is rarely called
into question. Our negative stance toward the elderly
appears on the surface not as a subjective expression of
bigotry or as a contingent historical quirk so much as an
objective fact about the human condition. This is strange
because, unlike other “isms” such as sexism or racism,
ageism isn’t directed at an amorphous “other” with a
different gender or skin tone, but at our own future
self. Understood this way, ageism looks like a kind of
self-­hatred of who we will one day become, and this
means that older persons today probably participated
in the same negative stereotyping that they are now
being subjected to. As Beauvoir puts it, “[w]e carry this
ostracism so far that we even reach the point of turning
it against ourselves: for in the old person that we must
become, we refuse to recognize ourselves.”5 This, she
says, is “astonishing, since every single member of the
community must know that his future is in question.”6
But in previous eras older persons were not dismissed
as incarnations of suffering, illness, and death. Indeed,
growing old was viewed as a sign of grace, and mortality

15
 One Beat More

was more commonly associated with youth, with dying

in childbirth, with injuries from battle, with execu-
tions, or with various vocational hazards. The old were
regarded as fonts of vitality and wisdom. Their voices
mattered because they embodied a deep understanding
of the customs, myths, and rituals that held their com-
munities together.7 This sense of respect and veneration
helps us understand the words of the Stoic philosopher
Seneca (4 bc–ad 65) in their proper cultural context:
“Let us cherish and love old age, for it is full of pleasure
if one knows how to use ­it . . . ­if God is pleased to add
another day, we should welcome it with glad hearts.”8
Contrast Seneca’s reflections with the dehumanizing
views we have today, when older adults are scorned and
functionally removed from productive society, given
over to the paternalizing control of medical experts,
and warehoused in nursing homes and retirement
communities. Beauvoir refers to this phenomenon as
nothing less than a “failure of our entire civilization,”9
but the failure is not merely the byproduct of the unique
sociohistorical forces of modern capitalism. The exis-
tentialist understands that the segregation of the elderly
and the structural discriminations of ageism emerge out
of something more insidious and primal: out of our
collective fear of death.
Of all the existentialists, none was more haunted by
death than Kierkegaard, whose name is homonymous
with kirkegård, the Danish word for “graveyard.” In
his brief life of forty-­two years, he witnessed the deaths
of his parents and of five of his seven siblings; and he
had the prophetic belief that he, too, was fated to die
at a young age.10 Kierkegaard was intimately familiar
with the abyss that yawns and swirls beneath our lives

16
 Death-Man

and recognized this abyss as the wellspring of all our

neuroses. He saw death as the ultimate concern, the
fundamental given of our existence, and reminded his
readers that, although death was certain, the time of
death was uncertain; it could come for any of us at any
moment. From the standpoint of this “uncertain cer-
tainty,” he introduced a pioneering distinction between
“fear” (frygt) and “anxiety” (angst) that would later
become axiomatic in the development of existential psy-
chotherapy. He argued that fear always has an object;
it is always of something, and these thing-­like fears can
be managed and controlled to some extent if we make
efforts to avoid them. Anxiety, on the other hand, is a
fear of nothing; it is fear of the annihilating chasm at
the heart of the human condition. Anxiety reveals that
there is nothing solid or stable that secures my existence,
that I am lost, and that there is no underlying reason
for me to be. And I cannot point to what it is that I
am anxious about because I myself am the source of
anxiety. Kierkegaard went on to show that most of our
everyday fears manifest themselves as displaced anxiety,
whereby the inchoate fear of my own nothingness is
transferred onto a more manageable fear of something.
My fear of divorce, of losing my job, or of my upcoming
colonoscopy displaces and covers over what it is that
I’m really afraid of. Kierkegaard believed that, when
anxiety is displaced in this way, “the nothing which is
the object of anxiety becomes as it were more and more
a something.”11
He goes on to argue that our cultural institutions and
social practices are built in large part to repress this anxi-
ety and to keep death hidden from us. Losing ourselves
in these practices creates the illusion of ­well-­being, that

17
 One Beat More

we are living a good life, that we are not lost, not in

despair. In The Sickness unto Death, he writes:

Precisely by losing himself in this way, such a person

has gained all that is required for going along superbly
in business and social life, yes, for making a great suc-
cess out of life. Far from anyone thinking him to be
in despair, he is just what a human being ought to be.
Naturally the world has generally no understanding of
what is truly horrifying. The despair that not only does
not cause any inconvenience in life but makes life con-
venient and comfortable is, naturally enough, in no way
regarded as despair.12

But Kierkegaard believes that this “convenient and

comfortable” life is itself the greatest form of despair;
it is the despair of self-­deception, of “not wanting to
be oneself, of wanting to be rid of oneself.”13 And the
myriad ways in which we lie to ourselves about death are
all too familiar. We believe in the immortality of the soul
and an afterlife. We have children, in the hope of living
on in them after we’re gone. We accumulate wealth,
publish books, and produce works of art that will leave
a lasting mark. We obsess about fitness and diet and
cosmetically alter our physical appearance in our efforts
to stay young. We treat aging and death as medical
problems that can be solved with new treatments and
technologies. We believe in our own specialness: death
may happen to others, but it can’t possibly happen to
me. We even avoid using the word “death” altogether,
because of the singular horror it evokes. In his famous
story The Death of Ivan Ilych, the Russian novelist Leo
Tolstoy captures this deep-­seated avoidance through his
titular character, a shallow everyman suddenly stricken

18
 Death-Man

with a terminal illness who is in such a state of denial

that he can speak of death only from a detached, third-­
person standpoint, as a nameless “It” that stalks him.
As the illness progresses, his futile attempts to deperson-
alize death become more desperate.

Ivan Ilych would turn his attention to it and try to drive

the thought of it away, but without success. It would
come and stand before him and look at him, and he
would be horrified, and the light would die out of his
eyes, and he would again begin asking himself whether
It alone was t­ rue . . . ­He would go to his study, lie down,
and again be alone with It: face to face with It. And
nothing could be done with It except to look at it and
shudder.14

Ivan Ilych is like all of us, clinging to familiar cultural

norms and symbolic practices that shelter us from the
terrifying mutability and impermanence of existence.
They serve as character defenses that conceal death by
creating the appearance that there is something stable,
solid, and secure about our lives. Illness and old age are
painful exercises in tearing those defenses down and
in giving up on the illusion of control. Older persons
are frightening to us precisely because they expose our
own vulnerability, and we live in a state of denial by
pushing them to the margins of our lives. When we
mock older persons, we are drawing a clear distinction
between “us” and “them.” In this way, the rampant
ageism we experience today can be regarded as a mani-
festation of our society’s effort to deny and turn away
from death. Even media images of so-­called “successful
aging” are often expressions of this denial, revolving
as they do around tropes of autonomy, strength, and

19
 One Beat More

mobility. They g­enerally betray the hard realities of

growing old, of bodily pain and mental decline, of loss,
of being confined to a wheelchair or nursing home. But,
more importantly for the existentialist, they point to a
deep despair founded on an unwillingness to be honest
with ourselves. And Kierkegaard makes it clear that
the masquerade is in vain; illness, disability, and death
always catch up to us.

Do you not know that there comes a midnight hour when

everyone has to throw off his mask? Do you believe that
life will always let itself be mocked? Do you think you
can slip away a little before midnight in order to avoid
this? Or are you not terrified by it? I have seen men in
real life who so long deceived themselves that at last
their true nature could not reveal itself.15

It is clear that the midnight hour is coming, but here

is the trick. For Kierkegaard, we should not recoil from
death but earnestly turn toward it, welcome it, and work
to integrate it into our lives. Death is our teacher. It is a
reminder of our temporal nature, that our time is short,
and that our lives cannot be delayed or postponed until
tomorrow, next month, or next year. Rilke refers to
this attitude as an affirmation of our existence, a state
in which we don’t run away from death but befriend it,
allowing it to “come very close and snuggle up to [us].”16

Believe me that death is a friend, maybe the only one who

is never, never deterred by our actions and i­ ndecision . . .
­and this, you understand, not in the sentimental–roman-
tic sense of a denial of life, of the opposite of life, but our
friend especially then when we most passionately, most
tremblingly affirm our being-­here . . . ­Death is the real
yes-­sayer.”17

20
 Death-Man

This attitude of affirmation and acceptance is what

Kierkegaard means by “earnestness” (alvor). It is to live
with a sense of seriousness about death, and it is this
seriousness that gives our projects a sense of urgency,
meaning, and value that they otherwise wouldn’t
have if we continued to drift along in self-­deception,
thinking that our time was limitless. “Earnestness,” in
Kierkegaard’s words, “becomes the living of each day as
if it were the last and also the first in a long life, and the
choosing of work that does not depend on whether one
is granted a lifetime to complete it well or only a brief
time to have begun it well.”18 When our own death is
squarely in view, it enriches the fleeting moments of our
lives, allowing us to become fully present to their depth
and poignancy. This kind of person, for Kierkegaard,
is outwardly unremarkable. In Fear and Trembling, he
suggests an earnest man could easily be mistaken for
a clerk, a shopkeeper, or a postman; there is nothing
“aloof or superior” about him. What stands out, how-
ever, is that he seems to “take delight in everything he
sees.”

He lives as carefree as a ne’er-­do-­well, and yet he buys

up the acceptable time at the dearest price, for he does
not do the least thing except by virtue of the a­ bsurd . . .
­Finiteness tastes to him just as good as to one who never
knew anything higher.19

When Kierkegaard, writing for his nominally Lutheran

readers in nineteenth-­century Copenhagen, says that the
earnest person lives “by virtue of the absurd,” he is
making it clear that such a person recognizes the fun-
damental paradox of religious existence, that the divine
is not to be found in some otherworldly realm; it is

21
 One Beat More

actually bound up in the temporal. It is the finite that

has infinite significance. By soberly facing and accept-
ing death, the true Christian experiences the divine in
this life, and is able to “live joyfully and happily every
instant,” seeing that each moment might be his or her
last.20 In this way the person recognizes an appalling
truth about God: that “he wants you to die, to die
unto the world,” because dying is a kind of freedom; it
liberates us from trivial concerns and distractions and
enables us to treasure the moments we have now rather
than deferring life to some illusory future.21 The earnest
person knows that we lie to ourselves when we think
our happiness is always around the next corner, after
the promotion, the wedding, the birth of the child, or the
retirement. With death as our most uncertain certainty,
all we have is this moment, and the moment is ambigu-
ous; it is not just a cause for anxiety but a cause for joy
as well. The German philosopher Martin Heidegger will
later develop this idea in Being and Time, by writing:
“along with the sober anxiety which brings us face to
face with our individualized potentiality-­for-­being, there
goes an unshakable joy in this possibility. In it, existence
becomes free from the entertaining ‘distractions’ with
which we busy ourselves.”22
Oncologists and palliative care physicians have long
been witnesses to this kind of personal transformation.
They have treated terminally ill patients who were ini-
tially horrified at their diagnosis but eventually came to
view it as liberating. In accepting death, their remaining
days often lit up with a sense of urgency and deep mean-
ing; the gravity of their condition pulled them away
from frivolous quarrels and ego-­driven concerns toward
a feeling of gratitude for the short time that was left.

22
 Death-Man

Clinical psychologist Mary Pipher describes a conversa-

tion in which an oncologist tells one of his patients:
“you are about to experience the most affirming era of
your lifetime.”23 Another patient, Kathy, who nearly
died of kidney failure, echoes this sentiment, describing
her own experience as an existential rebirth.
The first Kathy died during dialysis. She could not make
it long in the face of death. A second Kathy had to be
born. This is the Kathy that was born in the midst of
death . . .
The first Kathy lived for trivia only. But the second
Kathy—that’s me now. I am infatuated with life. Look
at the beauty of the sky! It’s gorgeously blue! I go into a
flower garden and every flower takes on such fabulous
colors that I am dazzled by their ­beauty . . . ­One thing I
do know, had I remained the first Kathy, I would have
played away my whole life, and I would never have
known what the real joy of living was all about. I had to
face death eyeball to eyeball before I could live. I had to
die in order to live.24

Kathy has made what Kierkegaard calls a “leap” (Spring)

into the absurd.25 Through her dying to the world, the
world has come back to her with a depth and an intensity
that were missing before her diagnosis. For Kierkegaard,
“dying is one of the most remarkable leaps” precisely
because it shakes us out of our routinized drift, allows
us to see what is really important, and awakens in us a
sense of appreciation for simply being alive.26 This may
explain why many terminal patients have referred to
their cancer diagnosis positively and, according to Irvin
Yalom, sometimes describe it as the best thing that ever
happened to them.27 But we don’t need a terminal diag-
nosis to experience this ­transformation. We are already

23
 One Beat More

terminal, and when we move into the evening of life, the

transformation may come more naturally.
This exposes one of the unsettling truths about the
coronavirus pandemic. By bringing death clearly into
view, it made us realize that we can no longer flee from
it. As the world masked up and great cities shut down,
as hospitals overflowed with the sick and dying, as we
were reminded that a person died from the virus every
thirty-­three seconds, death ceased to be an impersonal
or abstract event.28 We are all waking up to our own
finitude, grappling with the reality that it is now my
life and my death that are at stake. B. J. Miller, a pal-
liative care physician, describes the existential insights
that the pandemic has brought to his own dying
patients.

Earlier last week, I had a patient lean into her com-

puter’s camera and whisper to me that she appreciates
what the pandemic is doing for her: She has been living
through the final stages of cancer for a while, only now
her friends are more able to relate to her uncertainties,
and that empathy is a balm. I’ve heard many, in hushed
tones, say that these times are shaking them into clar-
ity. That clarity may show up as unmitigated sorrow or
discomfort, but that is honest and real, and it is itself a
powerful sign of life.29

The pandemic has pulled away the veil, reminding us

how close we are to death at every moment and forcing
us to confront the most uncertain certainty that we have
spent most of our lives hiding from. It allows us to see,
finally, what really matters: not the new car, the job title,
or the petty grievance at work but the simple, fleeting
delights in life that we ordinarily take for granted. As

24
 Death-Man

Oregon Senator Richard Neuberger wrote just months

before he died of cancer,

Questions of prestige, of political success, of financial

status, became all at once ­unimportant . . . ­In their stead
has come a new appreciation of things I once took for
granted—eating lunch with a friend, scratching Muffett’s
ears and listening for his purrs, the company of my wife,
reading a book in the quiet cone of my bed lamp at ­night
. . . ­For the first time I think I’m actually savoring life.30

When we are young and healthy, we are, in

Kierkegaard’s words, often “too tenacious of life to
die.”31 But this tenacious grip begins to loosen as we
grow older and move closer to death; we begin to let
go of the temporal and, by virtue of the absurd, the
temporal comes back to us and is now illuminated
in ways it never was before. Kierkegaard calls this a
“double movement” (dobbeltbevaegelse), a movement
whereby “every instant we see the sword hanging over
the head” and are overcome not only with terror but
with awe, as we marvel at the majesty and richness of
the moment.32 John Leland noticed this deep wisdom in
his study of the elderly. Jonas Mekas, one of the New
Yorkers with whom Leland spent more than one year,
was a ninety-­two-­year-­old Lithuanian immigrant who
survived the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps
and lived with an unblinking acceptance of death and an
awareness that the future was an illusion. He appeared
to embrace Kierkegaard’s paradox, that the finite has
infinite significance, that the eternal is not to be found
in some supersensible realm but is right here, in the
present. After experiencing so much loss in his long
life, he describes the simple delights of the temporal

25
 One Beat More

that we assume will always be there for us, like eating

a plate of grapes. “This plate is my Paradise,” he says.
“I don’t want anything else—no country house, no car,
no dacha, no life insurance, no riches. It’s this plate of
grapes that I want. It’s this plate of grapes that makes
me really happy. To eat my grapes and enjoy them and
want nothing else—that is happiness, that’s what makes
me happy.”33
Jonas sees death-­man in the mirror, but doesn’t recoil
from what he sees. He has no illusions and embodies
the Kierkegaardian spirit of earnestness. Jonas knows
that the clock is ticking, but it is this knowledge that
each fleeting moment could be his last, that this grape
may be the last sweet thing he tastes, that gives meaning
and clarity to his life. Kierkegaard describes this state
as being “awakened” to who we are and to what we
really care about; it is “to be wide awake and to think
­death . . . ­to think that all was over, that everything
was lost along with life,” but to do so “in order to win
everything in life.”34 Awakened in this way, Jonas lives
with a sense of urgency and vitality that is missing in
folks half his age. In the winter of his life, he embodies
the core truth of Kierkegaard’s philosophy: that “death
in earnest gives life force as nothing else does; it makes
one alert as nothing else does.”35

26
 2
Letting Go

Above all, don’t lie to yourself.

Fyodor Dostoevsky

When I had my heart attack in the winter of 2017,

I was finishing up a sixty-­mile bike ride, something I
did regularly on weekends. I had long prided myself
on my athleticism and fitness and spent much of my
youth playing sports and hiking and skiing in the Rocky
Mountains. As I drifted into an academic career and
into middle age, I moved away from the high peaks
but continued a vigorous exercise program at the gym,
on racquetball courts, and on my road bike. Seeing
myself through the prism of physical strength created
the comforting illusion that there was something secure
and thing-­like about my existence, that I was solid and
invulnerable. This view extended to how I saw myself
in the classroom: as a passionate and dynamic teacher,
who could engage students for hours at a time with
lively and animated lectures. This self-­interpretation all
came crashing down with my failing heart. After leaving
the intensive care unit at the hospital and in the days

27
 One Beat More

and weeks that followed, I could barely walk to the end

of the block without losing my breath, and the various
blood pressure and arrhythmia medications made me
light-­headed and fatigued in front of my students. It
felt as if the ground beneath me was collapsing as I
confronted the reality that I was no longer the person
I used to be. This forced me to face the difficult question
of who the “true” or “real” me actually was. If I am not
a strong, healthy, and energetic college professor, who
am I?
For the existentialist, human existence is not a deter-
minate thing; it is the activity or process of self-­creation,
and we become who we are only on the basis of the situ-
ated choices and actions we make as our lives unfold.
This means that human existence is always on the way,
always “not yet,” as we ceaselessly fashion and refash-
ion ourselves against the constraints and limitations of
life. When we leave home for the first time, when we
graduate from college, when we get married and start
a family, when we retire from work, we are forever
running up against new constraints and limitations
and must continually re-­create ourselves in their midst.
This is what distinguishes us from other animals. As
the Spanish existentialist José Ortega y Gasset writes,
“our being consists not in what it is already, but in
what it is not yet, a being that consists in not-yet-being.
Everything else in the world is what it i­s . . . ­Man is the
entity that makes i­tself . . . ­He has to determine what
he is going to be.”1 Ortega y Gasset is not suggesting
here that there are no facts that determine us as human
beings. It is a fact, for instance, that I was born a man,
or that I am—at least for the time being—ambulatory
and able-­bodied, or that I am shaped and influenced

28
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
 Es ist bestimmt

Es ist bestimmt in Gottes Rat,

Daß man, was man am liebsten hat,
Muß meiden!
Wiewohl nichts in dem Lauf der Welt
Dem Herzen, ach! so sauer fällt,
Als Scheiden, ja Scheiden!

Feuchtersleben
Nach einem Volksliede
 Sternennacht

Die Sterne die begehrt man nicht,

Man freut sich ihrer Pracht,
Und mit Entzücken blickt man auf
In jeder heitern Nacht.

Goethe
 Abendlied

Nun ruhen alle Wälder,

Vieh, Menschen, Städt’ und Felder,
Es schläft die ganze Welt:
Ihr aber, meine Sinnen,
Auf, auf! ihr sollt beginnen,
Was eurem Schöpfer wohlgefällt.

Der Tag ist nun vergangen,

Die güldnen Sternlein prangen
Am blauen Himmelssaal:
Also werd’ ich auch stehen,
Wenn mich wird heißen gehen
Mein Gott aus diesem Jammertal.

Paul Gerhardt
Der Mond ist aufgegangen,
 Die goldnen Sternlein prangen
Am Himmel hell und klar;
Der Wald steht schwarz und schweiget,
Und aus den Wiesen steiget
Der weiße Nebel wunderbar.

Wie ist die Welt so stille

Und in der Dämm’rung Hülle
So traulich und so hold
Als eine stille Kammer,
Wo ihr des Tages Jammer
Verschlafen und vergessen sollt.

Seht ihr den Mond dort stehen?

Er ist nur halb zu sehen
Und ist doch rund und schön!
So sind wohl manche Sachen,
Die wir getrost belachen,
Weil unsre Augen sie nicht sehn.

So legt euch denn, ihr Brüder,

In Gottes Namen nieder;
Kalt ist der Abendhauch.
Verschon’ uns, Gott, mit Strafen
Und laß uns ruhig schlafen,
Und unsern kranken Nachbar auch!

Matthias Claudius
Ein Lied hinterm Ofen zu singen

Der Winter ist ein rechter Mann,

Kernfest und auf der Dauer;
Sein Fleisch fühlt sich wie Eisen an,
Er scheut nicht Süß noch Sauer.

Aus Blumen und aus Vogelsang

Weiß er sich nichts zu machen,
Haßt warmen Trank und warmen Klang
Und alle warmen Sachen.

Doch wenn die Füchse bellen sehr,

Wenn’s Holz im Ofen knittert
Und an dem Ofen Knecht und Herr
Die Hände reibt und zittert;

Wenn Stein und Bein vor Frost zerbricht

Und Teich’ und Seen krachen:
Das klingt ihm gut, das haßt er nicht,
Dann will er tot sich lachen.
Sein Schloß von Eis liegt ganz hinaus
Beim Nordpol an dem Strande;
Doch hat er auch ein Sommerhaus
Im lieben Schweizerlande.

Da ist er denn bald dort, bald hier,

Gut Regiment zu führen;
Und wenn er durchzieht, stehen wir
Und sehn ihn an und frieren.

Matthias Claudius
 Ludwig Richters
Lebenserinnerungen
eines deutschen Malers
A u s g a b e d e s E i n h o r n - Ve r l a g e s
Mit rund 100 Holzschnitten in Originalgröße
12.00, in Halbleinen 17.00, in Halbleder 35.00.
Richters Lebenserinnerungen gehören zu den lautersten
Offenbarungen des deutschen Geistes und niemand wird sich
dem Zauber dieser schönsten Jugenderinnerungen eines großen
Künstlers entziehen können. Zu den Schilderungen treten die
Holzschnitte von Richters eigener Hand, die ja längst Volksbesitz
geworden sind, und so entsteht ein deutsches H a u s - und
F a m i l i e n b u c h , das wohl nicht seinesgleichen hat.

Hebels alemannische Gedichte mit etwa 100 Holzschnitten

Ludwig Richters. Auf Velinpapier in handbemaltem Pappband
20.00, Halbleder 35.00, Ganzleder 150.00.
 Die bunten Einhorn-Bücher
Ein Winteridyll von Karl Stieler, mit vielen Illustrationen von
D. Brandenburg-Polster. 53. Tausend. Das Winteridyll ist die
reizvollste Dichtung ihrer Art, seit Jahren das Lieblingsbuch von
vielen Tausenden; in Pappband 3.00.
Das Matthäus-Evangelium. Mit 25 Holzschnitten Albrecht
Dürers; die einzige Taschenausgabe mit großem, kräftigen,
schönen Druck; die wundervollen Holzschnitte Dürers und der
schöne Einband machen das Büchlein zu einem kleinen
Prachtwerk; in handbemaltem Pappband 3.00.

Der Kaiser im Kriege. Mit 26 photographischen Bildnissen

und Aufnahmen des Kaisers auf allen Kriegsschauplätzen; in
Pappband 3.00.
Das kleine Kochbuch für die fleischlose Küche, mit 275
wohlschmeckenden und nahrhaften Gerichten für die Jetztzeit.
Mit vielen humorvollen Zeichnungen von Otto Wirsching; in
handbemaltem Pappband 3.00.
Friedrich Naumann, Glauben und Hoffen. Andachten für
suchende Menschen. Mit vielen holzschnittartigen
Schmuckstücken von Otto Wirsching; in handbemaltem
Pappband 3.00.
Ludwig Richter-Büchlein. Mit 50 Holzschnitten Ludwig
Richters; in handbemaltem Pappband 3.00.
Gustav Meyrink, Der Löwe Alois und andere Geschichten
mit Illustrationen des Simplizissimus-Zeichners C. O. Petersen, in
handbemaltem Pappband 3.00. — Der Dichter des berühmten
„Golem“ als genialer Humorist.
Otto Julius Bierbaum, Leichtfertige Geschichten.
Illustrationen von F. Christophe; in handbemaltem Pappband
3.00. Die lustigsten Geschichten Bierbaums.
Peter Scher, Die Bruderschaft vom heiligen Wanst. Ernste
und heitere Zeitsatiren; in handbemaltem Pappband 3.00.
Theodor Storm, Immensee. In handbemaltem Pappband
3.00. — Die berühmteste Novelle Storms, ein wirkliches
Meisterwerk, trotz seines ungeheuren Erfolges.

Theodor Storm, Pole Poppenspäler. In handbemaltem

Pappband 3.00. Für Kinder so gut wie für Erwachsene.

Es waren zwei Königskinder

Novelle von Theodor Storm. In handbemaltem Pappband 3.00.

Sophie Hoechstetter, Aus blauer Vergessenheit. Novelle. In

handbemaltem Pappband 3.00.

Leander, Träumereien an französischen Kaminen;

mit vielen Illustrationen von H. v. Gumppenberg; kart. 3.00, geb.
4.00, in Halbleder 20.00. Das köstliche Werkchen ist in mehr als
fünfhunderttausend Exemplaren verbreitet worden und bedarf
keiner Empfehlung.

Einhorn-Drucke
Goethes Faust. Erster Teil. Mit Originalholzschnitten von
Professor Walter Klemm. Schrift und Druckanordnung von
Professor F. H. Ehmcke; in Halbpergament geb. 40.00, in
Ganzleder 250.00.
Shakespeares Hamlet. Mit Originalholzschnitten von Otto
Wirsching, gedruckt aus Ehmcke-Fraktur. Liebhaber-Ausgabe auf
Bütten, Holzschnitte handbemalt, in Ganzleder Nr. 1 bis C je
250.00; Ausgabe auf Velinpapier in Halbleder 40.00; die