Others that Die: Biography

Last week’s post made mention of one of the other ways that a person may die other than physically, according to Romano Guardini’s The Last Things. In that post, I mentioned that Guardini defined physical death in such a way that it is able to apply to other, non-biological forms of death, which often precede the biological.

While last week’s post looked at psychological death, Guardini uses the definition of death as “failure for the constructive powers to maintain itself” to apply to third form of death, namely the biographical.

Again, this biographical death could very well precede psychological death, for the kind of death referred to here is a death of the kind of story that a person thought he or she was going through. We can say this precedes psychological death because as Guardini defines biographical death:

Each man’s life is build around certain settled motives of action. These motives, for some reason, may cease to be, and no new ones come up to supply their place.

A woman, for instance, may be married, have children, manage a household. Then her children grow up, leave home and start families of their own. The woman is no longer indispensable. If she is not able to take up some other activity or fill her leisure from her own inner resources, her life, biographically speaking, is over. Its natural shape is complete, finished. What remains is to come to terms with the fact.

Or take a man who has thrown himself into his work with everything there is in him. The day comes when he perceives that out of loyalty to the work itself he must resign, and hand it over to someone better fitted to do it than he is. Unless he finds somethign to do that makes worth his while to begin afresh, or can put his leisure to intellectual or social use, his life, viewed as biography, is finished, however long it may linger on in fact.

The loss of a story for one’s life, in light of Guardini’s observation, constitutes a kind of death. It is this death that is of interest in any upcoming paper.

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