The Year's Best Science Fiction 10

Come, let us sit upon the ground

And tell sad stories of the death of kings...

In a year of much violence and tension, many displays of courage both wise and foolhardy—and a large number of shocking public deaths—too many by violence—the most profound shock and loss, to me, was the peaceful passing of Richard McKenna, who died in his sleep at the age of fifty-one of no known cause. Mac had published only a handful of short stories; I had the honor of reprinting the first one, “Casey Agonistes,” in an earlier Annual. He had written one fairy-tale-successful book, The Sand Pebbles, which he himself regarded as his “apprentice novel.” He did not live long enough to finish the second. What follows is from a speech he delivered at the University of North Carolina, in December, 1962:

“Any human life from birth to death can be understood as a gestalt in time. The linear sequence of any man’s experience and behavior forms a meaningful pattern, just as do the sequential notes of a musical composition. They form a mosaic distributed in time rather than in space. The arrangement is governed by the same principles as a spatial gestalt and closure can come only with death. A human life is an integrated whole which is more than the sum of its parts. But the wholeness is not achieved, nor is the final degree of integration achieved, until death. Therefore any experience, no matter how far back it seems to lie along the time-track, is not complete either. It will not be complete until the gestalt is closed and each experience making it up is given its final significance by virtue of its place in, and contribution to, the whole.

“The individual human past is not immutable. Everything in it is still happening and will not cease to happen until the gestalt is closed. Every past experience is subject to change, as the configuration of the forming whole is changed. Each man of us is living his own personal work of art, cannot avoid doing so, cannot evade artistic responsibility for his product, because that is one of the fundamental consequences of being human.

“When I first met that thought, I found it a very huge one. I have since improved my grip upon it by alternate approaches through existential philosophy, but it is still the scientific formulation of it which for me affords the most conviction. It is not a new thought. ... It is contained in the proverb, “While there’s life, there’s hope.”

I think that can be stated inversely. Most religions, probably all revolutions, have based their philosophy on the postulate: While there is hope, there is life. If the hope outlasts the individual’s life-span (as it may well do, in religion, in revolution, in any life of dedication to creativity), perhaps the final configuration of the life itself remains open to change, when the body is already in decay.