1) The photo of Tony Bloncourt seems quite well preserved, and for whatever reason his style seems pretty modern. It somehow creates a bit of cognitive dissonance or something; how could he have been killed by Nazis, he looks like the subject of a modern drivers license photo.
2) It is interesting that, despite being so awful, the Nazis let people write these last letters. I wonder how this tiny bit of humanity survived.
3) I wonder, is the line
> Today, I will have lived.
An expression, part of a well known poem, or something like that, in French? As the article notes
> This turn of phrase, so simple grammatically speaking, is deceptively philosophical because it captures the interval that separates the writer from the reader, the one who will have lived from the one who lives on.
It is a remarkable bit of grammatical sleight of hand to somehow pack so much this much reflection on mortality and life into, basically, a choice of tenses.
schoen · 3h ago
In Latin it's somewhat usual to use the past perfect of "to live" to indicate that someone has died.
In Dido's last speech in the Aeneid, before committing suicide, one of the things she says is "vixi" ("I have lived"). Cicero is also known to have used "vixerunt" ("they have lived") as a euphemism for reporting on how he had people executed.
So maybe this is a classicism in French, or maybe the author just thought of it spontaneously.
Latin also has a future perfect like this ("vixero", "I will have lived"), but I can't think of an example of people using it to talk about imminent deaths.
exmadscientist · 1h ago
> I will have lived
This is one of those constructions that works better in French than in English. It has future tense and perfect aspect (so, "future perfect"), which gets muddled in English since English generally muddles tense and aspect.
atombender · 2h ago
You might enjoy the photos of Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorski [1]. His photos were taken in the 1800s using an early colour photography technique. Many of them look as if they were taken today.
Aside from being black and white, photos tend to look old because of hairstyles and clothing. The "time traveling hipster" [2] is a good example of someone in an old photo creating dissonance by not conforming to expectations
> he looks like the subject of a modern drivers license photo.
I was reminded of an interview on Fresh Air around 10 years ago or so where a director was talking about going through casting photos looking for people who “looked like“ they belonged in the WWI era. Terry Gross knew exactly what he was getting at (as did I), in that outside of clothes and hairstyle, some people seem to just seem like they belong in different historical contexts (conversely, there are plenty of old portraits of people who see, like they belong more in the 21st century than the 18th).
mxuribe · 4h ago
This is interesting...when my partner and i watch films portraying an older, historic period, we use the term "timeless" or "classic-looking" to refer to some actors who mostly due to their appearance (and maybe a little makeup) can look like they belong in so many different periods. And, then there are other actors, who clearly don't seem like they would fit in periods outside of our own modern day...and this has nothing to do with whether any of the actors look attractive or not...its just a thing that some people have about their appearance (or not).
hammock · 2h ago
As much as we don’t want to think or talk about it, the gene pool has changed over time and it shows up in faces.
Not to mention diet, environment etc that also takes different tolls on our faces depending on the period.
By that logic there is such a thing as someone who looks like they lived in a different time, and would be rare to see today (and vice versa).
keybored · 4m ago
> It is interesting that, despite being so awful, the Nazis let people write these last letters. I wonder how this tiny bit of humanity survived.
I’m at a loss as to why the Nazis would put their foot down over a last smoke or a last letter.
palmotea · 1h ago
> 1) The photo of Tony Bloncourt seems quite well preserved, and for whatever reason his style seems pretty modern. It somehow creates a bit of cognitive dissonance or something; how could he have been killed by Nazis, he looks like the subject of a modern drivers license photo.
I think it's sometimes easy to get tripped up by funny clothes or hairstyles, and forget the people in the past were just like us. But there are only so many ways one can do their hair, and an oddly contemporary hairstyle can pull us back to the reality we're not that different.
thrance · 4h ago
OK, so I did a little digging on the guy behind the letter, Huỳnh Khương An [1]. Turns out he was born in Ho Chi Minh City, back when it was called "Saïgon" and a French colony.
He arrived in France between his 12th and 15th birthday, and then became a philosophy professor, and a communist one at that.
This guy was very much an intellectual, which explains the pretty and unusual "Aujourd'hui, j'aurais vécu" (Today, I will have lived). I don't think I've ever seen it elsewhere, so he probably came up with it himself.
His wife was arrested too but survived the war and went on to continue her communist activism.
j'aurai (without a s): future tense, not conditional ;)
yapyap · 4h ago
I don’t wanna be too harsh but I think that learning how to live from deathbed letters, especially the deathbed letters from people who were going to be sentenced to death is utter nonsense.
The letters were going to be checked by the people that were killing you — the nazis in this example — so your letter was never going to be “fuck those utter pigs” or anything resentful of the people that were going to be your murderers because they would just be shredded or burnt or destroyed in some way. So this has a massive impact on the contents of the letters.
Then there’s the unreliability of the narrator on the deathbed, I recently read a beautiful article about this about why you should not take advice from people on their deathbed or from yourself on your deathbed, the inherent bias you have will make you unreliable and the things you value and take for granted on your deathbed will not necessarily have been things you have always had but instead may be things you have worked hard for in your life. [1]
Now that’s not to say their words are nothingburgers but when you have to wholly draw your own conclusions from inherently biased letters it starts to feel like we are all pretending to care more about these words because of the sacredness of death. No one wants to disrespect the dead, no one wants to say “wow, he must have been really losing it at the end” and that’s a given, not to be rude to dead people. That’s like punching down to the first degree.
But like even things that would be considered light critiques or nice criticism don’t get to be said about take it or leave it bodies of work from dead people, because they are dead. On the one hand that’s a beautiful thing because let’s not start disrespecting dead people but on the other hand let’s keep it real.
I thought of that article too, but these letters are not really regret filled. For the most part, they knew what they were doing and ready for the consequences.
Rather, they're grieving and saying goodbye to loved ones. And the author wonders, how might we live more present to cherish our loves ones and feel the moments more deeply?
1) The photo of Tony Bloncourt seems quite well preserved, and for whatever reason his style seems pretty modern. It somehow creates a bit of cognitive dissonance or something; how could he have been killed by Nazis, he looks like the subject of a modern drivers license photo.
2) It is interesting that, despite being so awful, the Nazis let people write these last letters. I wonder how this tiny bit of humanity survived.
3) I wonder, is the line
> Today, I will have lived.
An expression, part of a well known poem, or something like that, in French? As the article notes
> This turn of phrase, so simple grammatically speaking, is deceptively philosophical because it captures the interval that separates the writer from the reader, the one who will have lived from the one who lives on.
It is a remarkable bit of grammatical sleight of hand to somehow pack so much this much reflection on mortality and life into, basically, a choice of tenses.
In Dido's last speech in the Aeneid, before committing suicide, one of the things she says is "vixi" ("I have lived"). Cicero is also known to have used "vixerunt" ("they have lived") as a euphemism for reporting on how he had people executed.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/vixerunt
So maybe this is a classicism in French, or maybe the author just thought of it spontaneously.
Latin also has a future perfect like this ("vixero", "I will have lived"), but I can't think of an example of people using it to talk about imminent deaths.
This is one of those constructions that works better in French than in English. It has future tense and perfect aspect (so, "future perfect"), which gets muddled in English since English generally muddles tense and aspect.
Aside from being black and white, photos tend to look old because of hairstyles and clothing. The "time traveling hipster" [2] is a good example of someone in an old photo creating dissonance by not conforming to expectations
[1] https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&as_q=Sergei+Mikhailov...
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/timetravelercaught/comments/e82116/...
I was reminded of an interview on Fresh Air around 10 years ago or so where a director was talking about going through casting photos looking for people who “looked like“ they belonged in the WWI era. Terry Gross knew exactly what he was getting at (as did I), in that outside of clothes and hairstyle, some people seem to just seem like they belong in different historical contexts (conversely, there are plenty of old portraits of people who see, like they belong more in the 21st century than the 18th).
Not to mention diet, environment etc that also takes different tolls on our faces depending on the period.
By that logic there is such a thing as someone who looks like they lived in a different time, and would be rare to see today (and vice versa).
I’m at a loss as to why the Nazis would put their foot down over a last smoke or a last letter.
I think it's sometimes easy to get tripped up by funny clothes or hairstyles, and forget the people in the past were just like us. But there are only so many ways one can do their hair, and an oddly contemporary hairstyle can pull us back to the reality we're not that different.
He arrived in France between his 12th and 15th birthday, and then became a philosophy professor, and a communist one at that.
This guy was very much an intellectual, which explains the pretty and unusual "Aujourd'hui, j'aurais vécu" (Today, I will have lived). I don't think I've ever seen it elsewhere, so he probably came up with it himself.
His wife was arrested too but survived the war and went on to continue her communist activism.
So yeah, definitely an interesting couple.
[1] https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hu%E1%BB%B3nh_Kh%C6%B0%C6%A1ng...
The letters were going to be checked by the people that were killing you — the nazis in this example — so your letter was never going to be “fuck those utter pigs” or anything resentful of the people that were going to be your murderers because they would just be shredded or burnt or destroyed in some way. So this has a massive impact on the contents of the letters.
Then there’s the unreliability of the narrator on the deathbed, I recently read a beautiful article about this about why you should not take advice from people on their deathbed or from yourself on your deathbed, the inherent bias you have will make you unreliable and the things you value and take for granted on your deathbed will not necessarily have been things you have always had but instead may be things you have worked hard for in your life. [1]
Now that’s not to say their words are nothingburgers but when you have to wholly draw your own conclusions from inherently biased letters it starts to feel like we are all pretending to care more about these words because of the sacredness of death. No one wants to disrespect the dead, no one wants to say “wow, he must have been really losing it at the end” and that’s a given, not to be rude to dead people. That’s like punching down to the first degree. But like even things that would be considered light critiques or nice criticism don’t get to be said about take it or leave it bodies of work from dead people, because they are dead. On the one hand that’s a beautiful thing because let’s not start disrespecting dead people but on the other hand let’s keep it real.
[1] https://www.hjorthjort.xyz/2018/02/21/the-deathbed-fallacy.h...
Rather, they're grieving and saying goodbye to loved ones. And the author wonders, how might we live more present to cherish our loves ones and feel the moments more deeply?