The following is
Essay #16, Confessions Of A
Triskaidekaphilia, of Dr. Ring's new book,
Waiting to Die: A Near-Death Researcher's
(Mostly Humorous) Reflections on His Own
Endgame.
I admit it. I am
a
triskaidekaphiliac. Perhaps you are not
familiar with that formidable term. Suppose
I were to tell you that I was born on
Friday
the 13th, and because of that, I have always
considered 13 to be my lucky number. So now
you have presumably divined my psychiatric
condition. I have an inordinate fondness for
the number 13.
Actually, that's
not my only confession. But since this will
be my last essay in this series, I reckon I
had better take the opportunity now to fess
up to some of my other sins.
For one thing,
do you remember that last essay of mine that
I entitled "Eighty-Three and Counting"?
Well, actually, that was written last year
when I was turning eighty-three. And to
confess further since I am now in a full
disclosure mode, so were most of the other
essays of mine I've inflicted on you. They
were all slightly past tense, even as I seem
to be these days, a man from a bygone era.
But this one is being written in real time,
not long before I will turn eighty-four when
I will be saying farewell to you, if not yet
to life (I hope!).
And that's
another thing I have to confess. All this
time I have been waiting to die, I have been
troubled by a niggling doubt. What if I just
don't have the knack for it? I keep waiting
for the man with the scythe to show up at my
door, but he seems to have got lost or
perhaps took up golfing, another way to die
before death. In any case, I guess I shall
just have to give up this pretense of
waiting to die. I'd better find something
else to do with my life. And I have.
I've written
another book. I seem to be making a habit of
it. To paraphrase General MacArthur, old
academics never die; they just keep writing
books that nobody reads.
This one is
about classical music, which is another
subject few people are interested in these
days -- or at least many fewer than was the
case when I was growing up back in the
antediluvian period when classical music was
actually a big deal. In those days, the
great conductor,
Arturo Toscanini (and his
NBC orchestra), was prime time entertainment
on national TV. There were also several
weekly radio programs (do you remember
radios?) featuring classical music, and many
motion pictures about classical composers or
opera singers. (When I was a kid I actually
saw one of these, "The Great Caruso,"
starring
Mario Lanza, seven times, which
will give you an idea of what kind of nut I
was about opera when I was a teenager.) Even
the famous "Ed Sullivan Show" that
introduced the Beatles to America also
introduced the young Israeli violinist,
Itzhak Perlman. "Those were the days, my
friends, I thought they would never end."
But they did.
It's just that I didn't. Which brings me
back to my book, which is about those days
when classical music was riding high in the
world and about all those fabulous musicians
who gave me (and millions of others) so many
thrilling experiences and countless moments
of pleasure.
Which also
brings me back to my upcoming birthday and
my seemingly incurable case of
triskaidekaphilia.
You see, this
year, assuming I make it to my birthday, it
will be special because it actually falls on
Friday the 13th. God willing, it will the
last Friday the 13th birthday of my life so
I plan to make the most of it. I was even
thinking -- still hankering for that perfect
death date -- that what would make it
particularly special is if (I know this is
morbid of me).
I would actually
die on that date. I mean, how cool would
that be -- to have been born on a Friday the
13th, and then, eighty-four years later, to
die on one. I would be like
Mark Twain who
was born in 1835 (exactly a hundred years
before I was) when
Halley's comet was
streaking through the skies, and then died
seventy-five years later when Halley's comet
had returned to see him off. Now, that kind
of symmetry really appeals to me.
But I'm not the
only person who has entertained such
thoughts, and I actually write about one
such man, a famous composer, in my new book.
How about if I give you a little sample of
what you'd find in this book about another
man who had a thing about the number
thirteen?
His name was
Arnold Schoenberg and this is what I wrote
about him:
Schoenberg was
my opposite: He suffered from a really bad
case of
triskaidekaphobia. So bad that it
killed him. We will get to that. |
But first, I
suppose I must state a few obvious and well
known facts about Schoenberg. Unlike the
first two Viennese composers we have
considered, Schoenberg was famous in his
lifetime and has remained famous after his
death. He is widely acknowledged as one of
the two most influential and important
composers in the first half of the 20th
century. He is most famous for the invention
of what to me is one of the most hateful
devices of modern music, the
twelve tone
system that gives equal weight to each note
of the
chromatic scale. That's his claim to
fame. It brought about a revolution in
modern music. To me, it brought about the
end of music and the beginning of something
that drove mass audiences elsewhere to find
their listening pleasures. All this is
familiar fare.
Whether
Schoenberg was "great" depends on your point
of view, but certainly when the definitive
history of 20th century is written,
Schoenberg's name will be a prominent entry.
He's a composer who really made a
difference.
But he was also
a very strange man. So rather than simply
treading over familiar ground in order to
tell you something about Schoenberg, I'd
like just to tell you one story about him
that will help you to understand just how
strange he was.
Schoenberg, like
Korngold [another composer I wrote about],
was a Jewish refugee from Vienna who was
forced to leave when the Nazis came to power
and, again like Korngold, he settled in Los
Angeles. Unlike Korngold, he didn't work for
the movies; he played tennis instead. And
continued to compose, to teach, to paint
(Schoenberg was also a gifted painter) and
to polemicize. But he also lived with a
demon.
It was his fear
of the number 13.
Schoenberg was
born on September 13, 1874, and in what
would be his last year, 1951, he would be
turning 76. But of course in Schoenberg's
phobic mind, he couldn't help thinking of
his age as 7+6=13, a fateful dreaded number.
And, as it turned out a fatal one, since he
wound up dying on July 13 of that year.
But that's just
the beginning and end of the story. What
makes it even more curious and spooky is
what came in between.
Throughout his
life he fastidiously avoided rooms, floors
and buildings with the number 13. He even
refused to rent a house because its street
address had been 13 Pine Street. This was
not a superficial concern, but rather a
powerful, all-consuming obsession that was
central to his entire belief system. His
musical manuscripts show the customary
measure numbers, but starting with the
composition of the 13th song of the cycle
Das Buch der Hängenden Gärten (Book of the
Hanging Gardens), Schoenberg began to
substitute the number 13 with 12a in the
measure count. Then there was the case of
his opera,
Moses and Aaron. Oops, that makes
thirteen letters! For Schoenberg, that also
made for a big problem. But he found a way
to solve it. Simple but effective: He just
left out one of the "a's" in Aaron, so the
title of his opera became Moses and Aron.
Now you know why.
As Schoenberg
got older, the degree of his
triskaidekaphobia increased and spread into
all aspects of his life, from the mundane to
the existential. He absolutely dreaded his
sixty-fifth birthday in 1939, because that
year was a multiple of 13. In a letter dated
4 March 1939, Schoenberg wrote:
"Indeed, I
am not so well at the moment. I am in my
65th year and you know that 5 times 13 is 65
and 13 is my bad number." |
In 1950, on the
occasion of this seventy-sixth birthday,
Schoenberg received an ill-omened note from
his fellow composer and musician
Oskar
Adler. Adler stipulated that since
Schoenberg's age of 76 added up to 13 (7+6),
it would be a critically dangerous year.
According to friends and family, this
ominous suggestion severely depressed and
apparently stunned Schoenberg. His obsession
was taking a dangerous form.
Things finally
came to a head on Friday the 13th July,
1951. On that day Schoenberg stayed in bed
all day. He was sick, anxious and depressed,
but he wasn't going to take any chances. His
wife Gertrud reported, "About a quarter to
twelve I looked at the clock and said to
myself: another quarter of an hour and then
the worst is over."
But it wasn't.
Gertrud reported to her sister-in-law
Ottilie the next day that her husband had
actually died at 11:45, 15 minutes before
midnight, just as he had feared. The curse
of triskaidekaphobia had struck!
I think that
Schoenberg must have been a character in a
story by Edgar Allan Poe all along and just
didn't know it, don't you?
That will do it
for me, dear readers. It's been fun writing
these essays while waiting (and failing) to
die, and I hope you have found at least some
of them entertaining and maybe even a few
instructive and worth pondering,
particularly when I was discussing the
nature and implications of near-death
experiences. I know I wrote a lot of
second-rate humor and other flapdoodle, but
the material on near-death experiences was
the important thing and I hope I was able to
contribute at least something worthwhile to
you on that subject. I wish you all the best
of times, even though these aren't the best
of times, but at least you can be reassured
that when your time does come, it will be
indeed be the best of times, even more than
you can imagine.
Kenneth Ring's New Book:
Waiting to Die:
A Near-Death Researcher's (Mostly Humorous)
Reflections on His Own Endgame
|