ANTERO DE ALDA Photography Recent Works
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Time and eternity
The "crazy" Louis Althusser in the concentration camp of Schleswig-Holstein, the "drunk" Fernando Pessoa caught «in flagrante delicto» and the "legendary" Ernest Hemingway who chose a tragic end. Hemingway photo by ALFRED EISENSTAEDT/LIFE Magazine, Cuba 1952 (crop).
Althusser — the Algerian pied noir — committed himself to a foreboding silence, ten years before he actually died and immediately after strangling his wife, Hélène, being absolved by dementia. His ordeal began in the concentration camp of Schleswig (1940-45) and it was characterized by successive manic-depressive crisis, until October 22nd, 1990. He died at age of 72, of a somewhat predictable heart attack for a man who initiated five years before the drafting of an autobiographical essay entitled «L'avenir dure Longtemps» (The future is everlasting).
Pessoa (Fernando), whose friends have ensured never having seen him drunk, was once caught in «flagrante delicto», but the famous photography that documents it was preserved as a trophy to cheat destiny: he knew that Jupiter and Bacchus were instructed by Semele to abuse of wine in order to fend off disease, although it was certain that he not quite believed it. He died in 1935, with 47 years of age and a liver in ashes (some experts questioned later the official diagnosis: cirrhosis).
By the damage caused by alcohol, Hemingway must have made roughly the same calculations, aggravated by a dissolute life (there are those who accuse him of being more fanciful than genuine in his war chronicles, and there are inclusively those who argue that his works are a kind of «sub-fiction where he was the main character»). But the heavy drinker swordfish fisherman, who became a touristic attraction in Key West Beach and that, according to Scott Fitzgerald, needed a new woman for every book he wrote, did not die from addiction. His father, pursued by health problems, debts and a marriage plagued by female superiority, committed suicide when the writer was 40 years old, and shortly after, his mother (with whom he had a serious conflict since childhood) mailed him the murder weapon...
On the morning of June the 2nd 1961, in Ketchum, Idaho, Hemingway took his hunting shotgun and killed himself. He was hitting 62 and it is certain that — like all geniuses — that he spent his entire life trying to reconcile time with eternity.
____ It is predictable that Hemingway, like Deleuze, Celan, Virginia Woolf ... knew the Nietzschean maxim: «The notion of suicide is a great comfort — it to bear many bad nights» (Beyond Good and Evil, 1886).
"reconcile time with eternity" It is the recurring theme in Green Hills of Africa, by Ernest Hemingway, 1935.
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