Life's Accomplishments

... “Oh, well – he wasn’t going to write Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony anyway.”

This wry comment on how little most of us were likely to accomplish in life, no matter how long we lived, isn’t my own invention. I first heard it spoken in Swedish at a funeral while I was still alive. The corpse at that particular rite of passage was an obtuse and unpopular shipyard foreman named Per Olaf Rosenquist. He had died young… I went to the funeral with a fellow welder named Hjalmar Arvid Boström… As we left the church, Boström said to me: “Oh, well – he wasn’t going to write Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony anyway.”

I asked him if this black joke was original, and he said no, that he had heard it from his German grandfather, who had been an officer in charge of burying the dead on the Western Front during World War One. It was common for soldiers new to that sort of work to wax philosophical over this corpse or that one, into whose face he was about to shovel dirt, speculating about what he might have done if he hadn’t died so young. There were many cynical things a veteran might say to such a thoughtful recruit, and one of those was: “Don’t worry about it. He wasn’t going to write Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony anyway.”