Tags: Jack London quote; ‘the function of man is to live, not to exist’; possible sources.
Jack London on to live, not to exist.
For my post on the bacteriological
attack against China which Jack London had imagined to take place on the
first of May 1976, I did a little background research on this author* as I wanted to find out whether he had
belonged to any masonic lodges (because of 1st May 76). Even
though I did not find a definite answer to my query (one author claims that
he had been part of the Bohemian Grove – a bit like today when journalists
get invited to the Bilderberg meetings or to the WEF’s annual ‘one-percenters’
get-together’ [my coinage] in Davos), I nevertheless got the chance
to read some interesting material about Jack London. For the second time in
a little more than a month, I also came across his famous quote about
living, not existing (i.e. here).
If you do not know this quote, here it is:
‘I would rather be ashes than dust! I would rather that my spark should
burn out in a brilliant blaze than it should be stifled by dry-rot. I
would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow,
than a sleepy and permanent planet. The function of man is to live, not to
exist. I shall not waste my days trying to prolong them. I shall use my
time.’
As I am somewhat of a ‘quote-checker’, I used Duckduckgo (Yippy
having been declared ‘search engine non grata’, it would seem) to
try to trace which work of London’s was the one where this quote appeared
for the first time. The introduction to the anthology Tales of adventure
did not cause me to throw my arms in
the air and shout ‘got it’ as the anthology was published in 1953
(and thus well after London’s death); plus the quote appears in the
introduction, not in one of the tales... So I decided to go to the book
section of a famous search engine and I found the
quote on page 372 of what appeared to be a far more likely candidate: Jack
London and His Times by Joan
London, 1939. From there, it did not take me very long to
retrieve the full passage from one of the several copies available in
electronic format at the Internet Archive:
“I would rather be ashes than dust!” Jack
often announced during those last years, and when asked to explain what
he meant he would gladly enlarge on the theme: “I would rather that my
spark should burn out in a brilliant blaze than it should be stifled by
dry-rot. I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in
magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet. The proper
function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days in
trying to prolong them. I shall use my time.”
On other occasions, caught up by enthusiasm for a new plan or project,
he would exclaim. “I want to live a hundred years!” To his daughters,
one evening near the end, he said suddenly, ‘‘You are almost young
ladies now. Life is not easy for young people. So you must think of me
as a rock on which you can build, on which you can depend, always.
Wherever you are, whatever happens, you can count on me.”
The first daughter of Jack London and of his first wife, Elizabeth Maddern
London, Joan London not only was drawn to
socialism as her father had been for most of his life, and thus spent a
great part of hers being involved in labour activism, but she also put to
good use her writing and oratorial skills in a professional capacity to
help improve the lot of American workers during the Great Depression.
(More about this fascinating woman at http://www.jack-london.org/joan-london/08-intro.htm
or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_London_(American_writer.)
Joan London’s claim that her father was not
weary of life despite his health problems goes counter to some allegations
which have been made that Jack London was such an alcoholic that it
eventually did him in or that he even committed suicide. With respect to
the latter, I came across a page published on a website written in English
by a German fan of London’s who gives a detailed account of the tedious
process he had to go through to have the cause of London’s death amended
from suicide to kidney failure by the German editor of Miscosoft’s now
defunct Encarta
encyclopaedia – despite providing them with a copy of Jack London’s death
certificate. In the end, the latter were only willing to go for a
compromise. (See http://www.jack-london.org/suicide.htm.)
A possible literary antecedent of this
famous quote could be Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s poem Ulysses, for instance: ‘[...] I will drink
/ Life to the lees [...] Life
piled on life / Were all too little,
[...] Death closes all: but something ere the end,
/ Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
[...] To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths / Of all the
western stars, until I die. [...] To
strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.’
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45392/ulysses
In turn, Jack London’s quote or Alfred,
Lord Tennyson’s poem could have influenced John Gneisenau Neihardt’s poem
‘Let Me Live Out My Years’: ‘Let me live out my years in heat of
blood! / Let me die drunken with the dreamer’s wine! / Let me not see this
soul-house built of mud / Go toppling to the dust—a vacant shrine!’ https://web.archive.org/web/19990821045638/https://www.bartleby.com/104/87.html
Unless it was Neihardt (a poet and ethnographer of Amerindian cultures,
who was born in 1881 and died in 1973) who inspired London. Anyhow
literature does not come out of a vacuum and it is thus subject to much
cross-fertilisation.
* Of course, I knew who Jack London was. As most young boys of my
generation, I got to read at least one of his adventure novels.
Lausanne, 3rd of May 2021
