Items related to On Love and Death
In this intriguing blend of provocative images and reflective prose, Patrick Süskind reveals the hidden source of his mesmerizing fiction: an obsession with the darkly erotic link between love and death. A witty and thought-provoking meditation on the two elemental forces of human existence, drawing on scenes as contemporary as a young couple having oral sex in a traffic jam, as literary as Thomas Mann’s discovery of forbidden love at an advanced age, and as mythical as the stories of death conquered through love in the narratives of Orpheus and Jesus.
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Not so long ago I was driving through town. At a junction notorious for its short green lights, I had to wait for some time in one of the four or five queues of vehicles that were moving a little way forward only every few minutes. To left and right of me drivers were lighting cigarettes, fiddling with their radios, glancing at the newspaper, or if they were women freshening their makeup. The kind of thing you do when you are stuck in a small traffic jam.
In the car directly in front of me, however, a large and elderly Opel the colour of milky coffee with its boot bearing stickers of the silliest kind (‘Drive into me, I need the cash’, ‘Honk if you’re horny’), a young couple were passing the time in another way; they kept putting their heads close together to gaze at each other with fond smiles, to exchange remarks, finger, kiss and lick one another. They moved apart merely for brief moments, as if startled, and turned their suddenly blank faces to look out of their respective side windows, only to come together again a couple of seconds later with a sudden movement, as if they hadn’t seen one another for months, and then they went on kissing and staring at each other as if at a miracle. She was at the wheel, a girl of the pretty little mouse type, sweet profile, very smooth neck, a great deal of curly hair that tossed about slightly as she laughed, small and glistening teeth, bright eyes. He, on the other hand, lounging rather than sitting in the passenger seat, right foot hanging out of the window, left arm draped around her shoulders in a lordly manner, was the kind of young man you really wouldn’t want to know. A gruesome sight, all his movements ungainly, fat neck, shaven skull, silver ring in his left ear, spotty skin, snub nose, and his mouth always half open; he didn’t remove the chewing gum from it even to kiss her. Any objective observer could only think that the sweet little girl really deserved something better than this ghastly lout.
She herself didn’t seem to think so at all. She interrupted their dalliance only briefly to move forward next time the lights turned green. Then she had eyes for him alone again, began their lovey-dovey game once more, moved close to kiss him while he fondled her. Even worse, she reached for his right hand and took his sausage fingers one by one between her spotless teeth, nibbling and licking them, while he plunged his large left paw into the glory of her brown hair to move his fingers around in it, probably also exerting pressure until, in response to his hand or her own desires – who knows? – she lowered her head and disappeared from my field of vision, dropping sideways to his lap where she went on working on him, to which the lout responded by flinging back his head and grotesquely waggling the leg that hung out of the window with a dirty trainer on its foot.
Meanwhile the lights had turned green again, and drivers behind me were beginning to honk. At last the girl emerged, tousled and radiant, straightened up in her seat, and when there was more honking he swung round, turned his vulgar, gum-chewing visage towards me (though I had not in fact been honking at all), and made the most obscene gesture in the world with the finger that had just been paddling about in her beautiful hair. She stepped on the gas and shot away with squealing tyres just before the lights turned red, forcing me and the rest of the queue to stop.
‘Mann und Weib und Weib und Mann reichen an die Gottheit an,’ runs the duet in Die Zauberflöte. Man and woman, woman and man, together approach divinity. This hymn to love is sung by Pamina and Papageno. At the end of the opera Pamina will enter the temple of wisdom with her lover Tamino, thanks to Eros; Papageno, whose ambitions are earthier and who hopes at the most for a little ‘entertaining company’ from his beloved Papagena as well as physical delights, will still partake of divine happiness and immortality through their large family of small children. Both kinds of love are beautiful and good and whole, in the Platonic sense. But how – so I wondered as I waited at the red lights and watched the young couple race over the junction – how would Eros contrive to make those two engender and give birth in beauty?
Well, I told myself, they’re still young, very young, not yet twenty and thus erotically stupid. He, at least, is stupidity itself. But even she, the pretty little girl, is foolish, as pretty little girls sometimes unfortunately are. And according to Plato, fools do not strive for the beautiful and the good, for divine bliss, because they are satisfied with themselves. The wise do not strive for them either because they already have all those things. Only those who are half-way between fools and the wise, you and I and all the others waiting patiently here in a traffic jam for the next green light, are vulnerable to the arrow of Eros. And the scene just played out in the coffee-coloured Opel, I thought, has nothing to do with love, or anything even remotely connected with it, but represents a distasteful futility.
In the car directly in front of me, however, a large and elderly Opel the colour of milky coffee with its boot bearing stickers of the silliest kind (‘Drive into me, I need the cash’, ‘Honk if you’re horny’), a young couple were passing the time in another way; they kept putting their heads close together to gaze at each other with fond smiles, to exchange remarks, finger, kiss and lick one another. They moved apart merely for brief moments, as if startled, and turned their suddenly blank faces to look out of their respective side windows, only to come together again a couple of seconds later with a sudden movement, as if they hadn’t seen one another for months, and then they went on kissing and staring at each other as if at a miracle. She was at the wheel, a girl of the pretty little mouse type, sweet profile, very smooth neck, a great deal of curly hair that tossed about slightly as she laughed, small and glistening teeth, bright eyes. He, on the other hand, lounging rather than sitting in the passenger seat, right foot hanging out of the window, left arm draped around her shoulders in a lordly manner, was the kind of young man you really wouldn’t want to know. A gruesome sight, all his movements ungainly, fat neck, shaven skull, silver ring in his left ear, spotty skin, snub nose, and his mouth always half open; he didn’t remove the chewing gum from it even to kiss her. Any objective observer could only think that the sweet little girl really deserved something better than this ghastly lout.
She herself didn’t seem to think so at all. She interrupted their dalliance only briefly to move forward next time the lights turned green. Then she had eyes for him alone again, began their lovey-dovey game once more, moved close to kiss him while he fondled her. Even worse, she reached for his right hand and took his sausage fingers one by one between her spotless teeth, nibbling and licking them, while he plunged his large left paw into the glory of her brown hair to move his fingers around in it, probably also exerting pressure until, in response to his hand or her own desires – who knows? – she lowered her head and disappeared from my field of vision, dropping sideways to his lap where she went on working on him, to which the lout responded by flinging back his head and grotesquely waggling the leg that hung out of the window with a dirty trainer on its foot.
Meanwhile the lights had turned green again, and drivers behind me were beginning to honk. At last the girl emerged, tousled and radiant, straightened up in her seat, and when there was more honking he swung round, turned his vulgar, gum-chewing visage towards me (though I had not in fact been honking at all), and made the most obscene gesture in the world with the finger that had just been paddling about in her beautiful hair. She stepped on the gas and shot away with squealing tyres just before the lights turned red, forcing me and the rest of the queue to stop.
‘Mann und Weib und Weib und Mann reichen an die Gottheit an,’ runs the duet in Die Zauberflöte. Man and woman, woman and man, together approach divinity. This hymn to love is sung by Pamina and Papageno. At the end of the opera Pamina will enter the temple of wisdom with her lover Tamino, thanks to Eros; Papageno, whose ambitions are earthier and who hopes at the most for a little ‘entertaining company’ from his beloved Papagena as well as physical delights, will still partake of divine happiness and immortality through their large family of small children. Both kinds of love are beautiful and good and whole, in the Platonic sense. But how – so I wondered as I waited at the red lights and watched the young couple race over the junction – how would Eros contrive to make those two engender and give birth in beauty?
Well, I told myself, they’re still young, very young, not yet twenty and thus erotically stupid. He, at least, is stupidity itself. But even she, the pretty little girl, is foolish, as pretty little girls sometimes unfortunately are. And according to Plato, fools do not strive for the beautiful and the good, for divine bliss, because they are satisfied with themselves. The wise do not strive for them either because they already have all those things. Only those who are half-way between fools and the wise, you and I and all the others waiting patiently here in a traffic jam for the next green light, are vulnerable to the arrow of Eros. And the scene just played out in the coffee-coloured Opel, I thought, has nothing to do with love, or anything even remotely connected with it, but represents a distasteful futility.
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- PublisherOld Street Publishing
- Publication date2006
- ISBN 10 190584705X
- ISBN 13 9781905847051
- BindingPaperback
- Number of pages64
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