On The Death Of A Famous Young Man > IDEAS & IDEALS

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"The gods love the obscure and hate the obvious."
                        - Upanishads (c. 800-500 B.C.)
                    "Whom the gods love die young."
                        - Menander (c. 342-292 B.C.)

   
      Once more, the sudden death of JFK Jr., the only son of the late John F. Kennedy, the 35th President of the United States of America, in a plane crash last month made big news, like that of his father 35 years before. When his father was assassinated at 46, the news was a great shock and sorrow not only for the American people, but also for many people in Korea, including me. I was then 24, and a senior student at college. I remember the son was just a 3-year-old toddler then. During the time he grew up to be a fine, attractive, young man of 38, only to be killed so early, like a flower nipped in the bud by the unseasonable icy wind. The whole world mourned his tragic death again, mourned the immense, unrealized possibilities lying ahead of him, then asked: What's wrong with him? With them? With his family?

      I fell momentarily into a wandering musing about the early and tragic death of him. The direct cause of his death was his own small private airplane which he himself flew the day of his accident. But why should he be killed? Not all flyers are killed. Is there really a curse or something like a black cloud, as one TV announcer commented, that haunts the family? I was also reminded of the death of Princess Diana in England in an auto accident last year.

      As regards the three recent cases of early and tragic deaths that we have seen, for example, nothing explains or justifies the phenomenon better, as far as I know, than the two axioms from the Upanishads, ancient Hindu scriptures, and from Menander, a Greek dramatist, which I quoted in the above.  The truth of the two axioms becomes self-evident, I find, when applied to me. According to these two seemingly contrasting as well as conflicting statements I owe my present longevity of 60 to two reasons: firstly, I am an obscure person, and secondly, I am not loved by gods.

      True. There is no reason for any god or gods to love me and call me early. I am selfish, greedy, and full of vanity. I haven't done any good to others. And I am not famous, either. People don't recognize me on the street. My book, a collection of essays in Korean, doesn't sell well. Nobody asks me to appear on TV. Then I think I should keep and protect my obscurity tenaciously, and try to remain unloved by gods in order to prolong my life on the earth.

      I made some jokes. Longevity has nothing to do with the good or the bad, the obscure or the obvious. The old saying, "The good die young," is a good consolation for the bereaved family at the funeral, but is not a whole truth. All of us die young, die old, or die in between for countable as well as uncountable causes and reasons. The gods, if there be any, do love or hate the obscure and the famous equally. The only truth in this matter is that the famous die also famously, and the obscure obscurely.

      But still, there seems to be some truth in the belief that there is an invisible hand behind that deals with the fate of man, especially that of the great and famous people. All the Greek and some of Shakespeare's tragedies are all about the unexpected fall of the kings, princes, and princesses, who seem to stand above or beyond the common fate of ordinary people. They are born with all kinds of secular happiness and glory that all of us wish, desire and dream to realize, but mostly fail: wealth, power, fame, beauty, etc. Blessed with these blessings, they look secure, happy, and even immortal. There seems to be no reason for these privileged few to be unhappy, to suffer, or to die early. But we see they also do and so are, like us, and we would like to confirm the presence of this mysterious being who administers the blows, and feel relieved by reconfirming the common fate of us all. The Greeks had an appropriate word for this complex psychology of people: Catharsis.  

      But, life cannot be measured simply by its length. Some live long but only in misery and pain, while some live short but in happiness and in glamour. Some live a short life but do great works during their lifetime, while some live a long life without doing anything worthwhile to be mentioned or remembered. Some live a short and bad life like a young murderer, and some live a long and bad life like some old dictators in some parts of the world. Some live a short but good life like Keats, Diana and JFK Jr, and some live a long and good life like Mother Teresa, William Wordsworth, and my mother.  

      To live long is one thing, to live a good life is another. One is the matter of time, the other is the matter of value. Time and value in life cannot be measured or compared within the same category, and furthermore, each can only be felt always subjectively by the individual. We can say easily that we all want to live a long and good life, but a swarm of philosophical questions immediately arise and sting us like angry bees: how long is long enough? 50? 60? 70? 100? What is good in life? To live like a king in a palace? To be an epicure or a stoic? To write an immortal book? To do charity works? To become a teacher? A President?

      Indeed, we have nothing much to say or comment not only on the death of JFK Jr. but also on any death. What we can do is to mourn anybody's passing in sorrow and tears. Myths, superstitions, and religions in the world have their own good explanation, consolation and justification for the death of man, but in fact none of them explains anything about or does justice to it. For all those wise teachings and plausible assurances we remain as empty before it as ever, and as ignorant of it as ever. Even in mourning we don't know whom or what we mourn for. For the dead? Or for us left behind? We actually don't know for whom the bell tolls. Does it toll for the dead or for the quick? At the best  we mortals can join the dead at the very moment of mourning in sorrow and tears, and leave them, until we join them again by our own death.
                                                                                                         (August 7, 1999)