Notebooks: 1936-1947 (New York Review Books Classics)

by Victor Serge

While finishing the work on Fritz Fränkel’s manuscripts with Herbert Lenhoff, I remarked that what is most tragic about death, what is most unacceptable for the intellect, is the complete disappearance of a spiritual grandeur, made up of experience, intellectual elaboration, knowledge, and understanding, in large part incommunicable. The means of transmitting the achievements of a fine mind are almost derisory in comparison with the value and profundity of that achievement. One must continuously start afresh, reinvent: how much of the essential is lost! We wonder if the belief in the immortality of the soul, so tenacious in educated societies, is not called upon to provide psychological compensation for the devastating feeling of this destiny. —Life has its continuity, its new beginnings, and the intellect, which is its most precious fruit, ends in annihilation, whatever its treasures . . . Perhaps this is also one of the sources of civilization: a colossal social effort aimed at making up for this obliteration. The individual seeks to ensure his durability by his works, by the influence of his activity (accomplishing of a mission, pursuit of glory, the need to fix the moment, to express, to teach for the writer and the reformer; the need to “integrate oneself into history”). H. L. considers that the theory of “the destructive or death drive” (Totentrieb) to be one of the two fundamental bases of Freudian psychology (libido, Totentrieb), even though Freud only formulated i...