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279 Conclusion Encounters of Hope Karen Remmler The four photographs of Rachel Bespaloff—as a girl, as a young woman, and as an adult marked by the experience of exile—haunt us. The ghostly images are silent, even as the presence of this elusive and driven thinker is all around us, transported by the words of those who knew her and those who study her writing. Even as Bespaloff and many of the other Pontigny participants past and present wrote again and again of violence, I am struck by the ferment of creativity that emerged out of the encounters of Masson and Chagall , Stevens and Moore, and many others in 1942–1944, and the more recent 2003 symposium to which we have dedicated this volume. Do hardship, pain, and violence produce memorable art, art that mesmerizes as much as it shocks? Why the stagnation in plentiful times? What is it that stirs creativity, if not violence? Stevens notes that a violence from within protects us from a violence without. Is it this violence within imagination and energy that brings forth poetry instead of physical hurt? Is this the force that Christopher Benfey finds in the essays by Weil and Bespaloff, or the glimpses of secular redemption and resistance that many of the essays in this volume have left us with? Or is this the force that Arendt alludes to, the force in the political realm that is always bound to cause death, or, at the very least, alienation? Are the realms connected? Where do we find the hope that the past pushing us forward and the future pushing us back will not destroy the precious moments of the present? One way out of the impasse may be conversation and its prose form, correspondence. Holger Teschke tells us of the encounter between Brecht and Benjamin, in the midst of the Nazi deluge. They are in Denmark, sitting at a wooden table, talking about difficult things, yet surrounded by simplicity. I am reminded of Bespaloff’s reading of the Iliad and of Benfey’s reading of her essay.1 Recall the scene of supplication when Priam comes to claim the corpse of his son Hector from Achilles, who has not only slain Hector but also desecrated his body. This is perhaps one of the most poignant and unforgettable encounters in world literature. It provides not only a brief reprieve from battle, but also a coming together of enemies in grief—an encounter that is otherwise unfathomable. Two enemies engage in a conversation amid destruction: 280 KarenRemmler “Revere the gods. Achilles! Pity me in my own right, remember your own father! I deserve more pity... I have endured what no one on earth has ever done before— I put to my lips the hands of the man who killed my son.” Those words stirred within Achilles a deep desire to grieve for his own father. Taking the old man’s hand he gently moved him back. And overpowered by memory both men gave way to grief. Priam wept freely for man-killing Hector, throbbing, crouching before Achilles’ feet as Achilles wept himself, now for his father, now for Patroclus once again, and their sobbing rose and fell throughout the house.2 In this“exceptional deviation from the laws of the mechanism of violence,” Bespaloff finds “one of the most beautiful silences in the Iliad—one of those absolute silences in which the din of the Trojan War, the vociferations of men and gods, and the rumblings of the Cosmos, are engulfed. The Becoming of the universe hangs suspended in this impalpable element whose duration is an instant and forever.”3 How does this beautiful silence come to be? First, the person who has come to claim the corpse (this is no innocent corpse) supplicates the warrior Achilles. He comes to retrieve the corpse of his son so that he can perform the proper funerary rites. Achilles and Priam are bound by codes established by the gods. Yet they step out of their roles by acknowledging the humanity of the other—in the form of beauty and noble appearance. The sound of their mourning and weeping is the sound heard in the silence during the cessation of the war. Second, Achilles, who killed Hector, enraged by Hector’s killing of his friend Patroclus, does not rebuke him and even“gently” touches him, an extraordinary moment as Benfey shows us in his essay in this volume on the Iliads. Achilles will give the corpse to...

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