I. "The Merchant of Death Is Dead"

April 13, 1888. Cannes, France.

Alfred Nobel was at his villa. He was fifty-four.

He had just received a telegram — his older brother Ludvig Nobel had died of a heart attack in southern France.

The Nobel family was, in the late nineteenth century, one of the wealthiest in Europe. The father, Immanuel Nobel, had been an engineer and inventor; in the 1830s he had moved from Sweden to St. Petersburg in Russia to build his career. Three of his sons — Robert, Ludvig, Alfred — had each become inventors or industrialists. Robert and Ludvig had founded the Branobel oil company in Baku (now in Azerbaijan), at one point one of the world's largest oil firms. Alfred had built an explosives empire across Europe.

Ludvig had died.

Nobel knew that with family in different countries, the funeral arrangements would take time. He waited at Cannes for news.

The next morning he opened a French newspaper. He wanted to see if there was any report of his brother's death.

He found one.

But there was a problem.

The editors of that paper had made a mistake. They had confused which brother had died. They believed the dead man was Alfred Nobel himself, not Ludvig.

They had published Alfred Nobel's obituary.

The headline read —

Le marchand de la mort est mort "The Merchant of Death Is Dead"

The subhead —

"Dr. Alfred Nobel, who became rich by inventing ways to kill more people faster than ever before, died yesterday."

Nobel sat. He read the obituary through.

Then he read it again.

He was alive.

His body was alive. His heart was beating. His eyes could read the letters. His hands could hold the paper.

But the man in that obituary — that "merchant of death" — was also him. That was the way future people would remember him. When he really did die one day, the world's papers would write something like that. He had just, ahead of time, seen it.

Most people do not have such an opportunity. Most people, alive, cannot see in advance how they will be remembered after death. The judgement a person can make of his own being — the shape he leaves in the world — is usually vague. He may feel he has done good things in his life; he may feel he has left regrets; but he cannot precisely know how those who come after will fix his form.

Nobel had read it.

Alive, he had read the way future people would remember him.

That way was — a merchant who had made killing efficient, and grown rich by it.

He sat in the villa at Cannes. Outside the window was the Mediterranean. The money he had made in his life would have been enough to buy several cities. He had companies, factories, patents in over twenty countries. He was one of the wealthiest people in Europe. But all of this — all of it — was, under the lens of that obituary, compressed into one sentence:

He made killing efficient, and so he grew rich.

That sentence was not wrong.

It was a real summary of the work of his life — a summary he himself did not wish to acknowledge fully, but could not entirely deny.

He set the paper down.

He went on living. He lived for eight more years from that moment. On December 10, 1896, he really did die, of a stroke, in his villa at San Remo in Italy.

But across those eight years he did one thing —

He used those eight years to write a will.

The will that would mean that the "merchant of death" of the 1888 mistaken obituary would no longer be the only shape future people would remember him by.

II. Nitroglycerin

To understand what Nobel did, one has to go back to his work as an inventor.

Nobel was born in 1833 in Stockholm. His father Immanuel was an inventor, working in demolition and military engineering. In 1837 Immanuel went bankrupt in Sweden and moved to St. Petersburg in Russia. There he designed naval mines for the Russian military — during the Crimean War, Immanuel's mines helped defend St. Petersburg from the British navy.

Alfred grew up in St. Petersburg. As a teenager he was sent by his father to Europe and the United States to study chemistry and engineering. In Paris he studied under the chemist Théophile-Jules Pelouze. In Pelouze's laboratory he met for the first time a new compound —

Nitroglycerin.

Nitroglycerin had been invented in 1847 by the Italian chemist Ascanio Sobrero. It was an explosive — far more powerful than the black powder then in use. But it had a fatal problem —

It was extremely unstable.

Slight friction, impact, or change in temperature could set it off. Sobrero himself was burned across the face by it once — for the rest of his life he warned people not to use it; it was too dangerous.

Nobel did not accept that judgement. He thought the explosive force of nitroglycerin was revolutionary — if a way could be found to stabilize it for transport and use, it would change the world. Building railways, blasting tunnels, opening mines, quarrying — all this work needed stronger explosives.

He began his work on stabilizing nitroglycerin in the 1850s.

He did this for twenty years.

Across those twenty years there were repeated accidents. The worst was September 1864 — the Nobel laboratory at Heleneborg, outside Stockholm, exploded. Nobel's youngest brother Emil (twenty years old) and four workers died on the spot.

Nobel's father Immanuel suffered a stroke after that explosion and was paralyzed for the rest of his life.

Alfred himself was not in the laboratory at the time — he had escaped. But he saw his brother's body. He saw the laboratory destroyed. He saw his father become a man who could not walk.

He made a choice.

He kept working.

He did not give up on nitroglycerin. He believed the path was right — he believed he could find a way to stabilize it. He knew what continuing meant — that more people might die. But he believed that if he succeeded, his success would mean others would no longer die that way. If he gave up, the compound would still be researched by others — perhaps less careful — and more might die.

He continued.

In 1867 he succeeded. He found that absorbing nitroglycerin into a porous earth called kieselguhr (diatomaceous earth) made it stable — safe to transport, easy to use, precisely detonable. He gave the product a name —

Dynamite.

The name came from the Greek dynamis — power.

Once dynamite was out, it changed the world.

In the next thirty years, dynamite made these things possible —

The transcontinental railways of the United States. The Gotthard Tunnel through the Alps (completed in 1882, connecting Switzerland and Italy). The Panama Canal (begun in 1881, finally completed in 1914). The opening of gold, copper, and coal mines worldwide. All large quarrying and construction work from northern Sweden to South Africa to Australia.

The vast expansion of humanity's material infrastructure in the late nineteenth century — dynamite was one of its core conditions.

But at the same time —

Dynamite changed warfare.

In the centuries before dynamite, war had used black powder — its force was limited. Cities could be defended by walls. Armies had a ceiling on their killing power.

After dynamite, all that changed. Walls no longer worked — dynamite could blow them open. The firepower of the army was upgraded. Naval mines and torpedoes doubled in force. The high explosives that came after — including TNT — all developed from the dynamite line.

By the 1880s, almost every army in the world was using explosives in the Nobel series.

Nobel's factories were spread across over twenty countries. He himself became extremely wealthy.

But he never personally pulled a trigger. He never personally killed anyone. What he did was invent a tool that made killing more thorough, and sell that tool to those willing to buy. The buyers were mining companies — they used dynamite to dig mines. The buyers were railway companies — they used dynamite to build railways. The buyers were also armies — they used dynamite to kill people.

Nobel said in his lifetime — he believed that dynamite was so terrible that, in the end, it would make war impossible. If weapons were strong enough, no one would want to fight. This belief was held by a number of people in his time — and was later shown to be entirely wrong.

He believed it. But he also sold. There was no contradiction between the believing and the selling — by his logic, more widely selling more terrible weapons accelerated the process by which war would become impossible.

Later history — World War I, World War II, nuclear weapons — proved this logic wrong. The terribleness of weapons could not make war impossible. The more terrible the weapons, the more terrible the war.

But Nobel, alive, believed this logic. He earned his money with a clear conscience.

He believed himself to be doing good.

The 1888 obituary told him others did not see it that way.

III. The Business

Nobel was not only an inventor.

He was a transnational commercial genius.

In the late nineteenth century the concept of the multinational company was just beginning to appear. Most business was inside one country. Nobel was not — from the 1860s on he was building factories, setting up companies, registering patents in different European countries. By the 1880s he had operations in over twenty.

He built factories in Germany, in France, in Italy, in Britain. In Spain, Austria-Hungary, Russia, the United States. Each factory produced dynamite and other products in his series, by his designed processes. Each country had its registered subsidiary. All these subsidiaries together formed a transnational network — something rare in the 1880s.

He was also in oil.

He and his two older brothers Robert and Ludvig founded Branobel — the Brothers Nobel oil company — in Baku (then in the Russian Empire, today Azerbaijan). In the 1880s Branobel was one of the world's largest oil firms, a competitor to Rockefeller's Standard Oil. Branobel introduced several key innovations in the oil industry — the oil tanker (using ships to transport oil at scale), the pipeline, the modernization of refineries.

Although Alfred's main work was explosives, he was a major shareholder and decision-maker in Branobel. The oil firm gave him a large part of his wealth.

He also bought the Swedish Bofors company — a steel and arms manufacturer. In 1894 he used part of his fortune to buy Bofors, transforming it into a modern arms manufacturer. Bofors later became Sweden's main arms exporter, supplying both sides in the two world wars.

By the 1890s Alfred Nobel's wealth was estimated at 31 million Swedish kronor — equivalent to today's 250–300 million US dollars. In his time he was one of the wealthiest people in Europe.

How did he live with this money?

He had villas in different European countries — Paris, San Remo, Ayr in Scotland. He had carriages and horses and servants. He subscribed to dozens of scientific journals. He spent several hours each day reading and writing letters — he wrote thousands of letters in his life.

But his private life was almost empty.

He never married.

He had several relationships. The most important was with an Austrian noblewoman, Bertha Kinsky (later, by marriage, Bertha von Suttner). She had come to him in 1876 to apply for a secretarial position, but worked only briefly before returning to Austria to marry. The two kept up a correspondence for the rest of their lives — this correspondence was important to the later setting up of the peace prize (von Suttner became a famous peace activist; her novel Die Waffen nieder! — Lay Down Your Arms — was an inspiration for several generations of peace movements).

But von Suttner was not Nobel's partner. She had married someone else. Nobel went on living alone.

He also had, for about eighteen years, a complicated relationship — with an Austrian flower-shop woman, Sophie Hess. She was twenty years younger than him. He gave her money, let her live in Vienna under the name "Madame Nobel." But they never married — he knew she was not his match, and she had relationships with others. This relationship became one of the most painful parts of Nobel's life — she kept asking for money; she had a child with someone else; after his death she tried to extort his executors with the letters he had written her.

Nobel had no children.

He had no home.

He had vast amounts of money, businesses in over twenty countries, dozens of properties — but no place where he could exist as himself. He once wrote that he was "a lonely person who does not know where he belongs." He called himself "a European" because he could not say he belonged to Sweden (which he had left at nine), to Russia (where he had grown up but was not Russian), to France (where he spent most of his adult life), to Italy (where he last lived).

He was a transnational capitalist — a specific person without a specific belonging.

This loneliness had its cost. Nobel was depressed long-term. He himself wrote that he often thought of suicide. He wrote pessimistic poems. He wrote a play — Nemesis — about Beatrice Cenci, the Renaissance noblewoman who killed her abusive father and was executed by the papacy. The play is filled with Nobel's own pessimistic depiction of human cruelty. It was almost entirely destroyed by the Catholic Church the day after his death — only three copies survived to the present.

He was alive. He was wealthy. He was lonely. He was depressed.

Then the obituary came.

IV. After the Mistaken Obituary

April 1888.

After Nobel finished reading that obituary, he did not at once do anything.

He did not write a public letter explaining himself. He did not demand an apology from the paper. He did not discuss the event with friends. In Nobel's surviving letters from 1888 to 1895, not one letter explicitly mentions that obituary.

But from that year on, something in his life was different.

The first thing —

He began to think more seriously about how his estate should be handled after his death.

He had written several wills before. The earliest from 1889 — a year after the mistaken obituary. In that will he mainly left the money to relatives, friends, and a few charitable institutions. It was a normal will of a wealthy man.

But he was not satisfied.

He wrote several more — one in 1893, one in 1895. Each more radical than the last. Each left less and less to relatives, more and more to a new mechanism he was designing.

The second thing —

In his correspondence with Bertha von Suttner, discussions of peace began to appear.

Von Suttner published Die Waffen nieder! — Lay Down Your Arms! — in 1889. The book tells the story of an aristocratic woman in late-nineteenth-century Europe who loses her husband and son to wars. The book argued strongly against war — for international arbitration to settle conflicts, against the madness of large-scale arms races. The book sold hundreds of thousands of copies in Europe; it became one of the founding texts of the European peace movement.

Nobel read the book. He wrote to Bertha to discuss its arguments. He did not fully agree with her — he still believed his thesis that "the deterrent power of weapons can make war impossible." But he began to consider, if he were wrong, what then.

If the deterrent power of weapons could not stop war — if the work of his life had in fact made war more terrible rather than stopping it — what could he do to make up for it?

He could not undo the invention of dynamite. He could not call back the explosives he had sold. He could not make war disappear.

But he could do one thing —

He could use the money he had made to provide a long-term resource for the work that opposed the consequences of his own work.

The third thing —

Between 1889 and 1895, he mentioned several times to people around him that he wanted to set up a continuing reward for "work that benefits humanity."

The idea took shape slowly in his mind.

Not just to give money once (a one-time gift would be spent). To set up a mechanism — a principal sum, with only the interest used each year for the prize, the principal never touched — so that the prize would be given forever, once each year, to the work that "in the past year, conferred the greatest benefit on mankind."

The core of this idea was — to let his money keep working after he was gone.

Not inherited by his family (the family would use it to live their own lives; in a few generations the money would dissipate). Not given as a one-time gift to some institution (the institution would use the money to do one big thing, then end). Locked into a permanent mechanism, so that his money would meet a future person once each year — through a specific prize, given to a specific person, for a specific work.

This mechanism would let his being — the shape he left in the world — not be locked into the form of "merchant of death."

This mechanism would let his being appear in a new form once each year.

V. The Will

November 27, 1895. Paris.

Nobel was sixty-two. His health was already poor — he had angina, and had to take nitroglycerin (in a striking irony, dilute nitroglycerin solution had become a cardiac drug in the late nineteenth century).

He went to the Swedish-Norwegian Club in Paris and signed his last will.

He did not engage a lawyer.

He wrote it himself. By hand. Four pages. In Swedish.

He asked four Swedes at the club to witness it — none of them was a lawyer.

After signing, he placed the will in a safe deposit at Enskilda Bank in Stockholm.

The core clause read —

"The whole of my remaining realizable estate shall be dealt with in the following way: the capital shall be invested by my executors in safe securities and shall constitute a fund. The interest shall be distributed annually as prizes to those who, during the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind. The said interest shall be divided into five equal parts:

One part to the person who shall have made the most important discovery or invention within the field of physics; One part to the person who shall have made the most important chemical discovery or improvement; One part to the person who shall have made the most important discovery within the domain of physiology or medicine; One part to the person who shall have produced in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an idealistic direction; One part to the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies, and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.

The prizes for physics and chemistry shall be awarded by the Swedish Academy of Sciences; that for physiology or medicine by the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm; that for literature by the Academy in Stockholm; and that for peace by a committee of five persons to be elected by the Norwegian Storting.

It is my express wish that in awarding the prizes no consideration whatever shall be given to the nationality of the candidates, but that the most worthy shall receive the prize, whether he be a Scandinavian or not."

This will, when read out after Nobel's death in December 1896, immediately set off enormous legal disputes.

Nobel's family — his nephews and nieces — strongly opposed it. If the will were executed, the amount they could inherit would shrink from what they had expected to be nearly the whole estate, down to a small fraction. They at once challenged the legitimacy of the will — pointing out that no lawyer had witnessed it; pointing out that Nobel had not specified clearly how the relevant institutions were to execute it (the Swedish Academy of Sciences, for example, had not been asked at the time whether it was willing to take on this responsibility; the committee of five at the Norwegian Storting did not yet exist).

The King of Sweden, Oscar II, also opposed. Why should the money of a Swede be given to foreigners? In that age of rising nationalism, distributing the fortune of one of Sweden's wealthiest men through a prize expressly inclusive of foreigners was seen as an injury to national interest.

Sweden in that period was united with Norway as the "Swedish-Norwegian Union" (this union dissolved in 1905). The granting of the peace prize to a committee of the Norwegian Storting rather than the Swedish parliament also angered the Swedish political establishment.

Sophie Hess — Nobel's earlier "Madame Nobel" — produced some of the personal letters Nobel had written her, threatening to make them public if she was not paid. Nobel's executors finally paid her to keep her quiet.

The dispute lasted nearly five years.

But Nobel's two executors — Ragnar Sohlman (then only twenty-six, Nobel's assistant) and Rudolf Lilljequist — held firm to the central intent of the will. Sohlman, a young man, became the real hero of the Nobel story — he loaded all of Nobel's realizable assets in Paris into a horse-drawn cart, and personally moved them from Paris to Stockholm, because he feared the French government might seize the fortune as "assets within French territory." He did this before he was twenty-seven.

After several rounds of legal settlement, the will was, in essence, executed.

On June 29, 1900, the Swedish parliament approved the establishment of the Nobel Foundation.

On December 10, 1901 — the fifth anniversary of Nobel's death — the first Nobel Prizes were awarded.

The Physics prize went to Wilhelm Röntgen (for the discovery of X-rays). The Chemistry prize went to Jacobus van 't Hoff (for chemical kinetics and osmotic pressure). The Physiology or Medicine prize went to Emil von Behring (for the serum therapy of diphtheria). The Literature prize went to Sully Prudhomme (a French poet). The Peace prize was shared by Henri Dunant (founder of the Red Cross) and Frédéric Passy (a French peace activist).

The first ceremony was in Stockholm. King Oscar II — the same king who had publicly opposed the will five years earlier — attended in person and handed the prizes to the recipients with his own hands.

The Nobel Prize has been awarded once a year ever since.

To today, it has been awarded for over one hundred and twenty years.

Each year — once a year — a group of people sits down to decide what work, in that year, has "conferred the greatest benefit on mankind." Each year — once a year — a person, or a few, is remembered for a specific work. Each year — once a year — Alfred Nobel's name is bound together with a piece of work that benefits humanity.

Each year. Once a year.

The "merchant of death" of the 1888 obituary, beginning in 1901, has been covered over by a new obituary every year — an obituary, of how he wished to be remembered, written by the work of that year's laureates.

VI. The Other in the Future

What Nobel did has its own particular place in Round Six.

The figures of Round Six so far — from Hypatia to Rilke — did concrete work in their lifetimes, and after their deaths that work continued in the world in the form of being. That continuation was not arranged by them — the unfolding came through those who later read them, used them, were ignited by them. Hypatia made no arrangement for her being after her death. Aquinas did not. Cao Zhi did not. Each lived, did what he could in his life, died, and his being then continued through others.

Nobel was different.

Nobel, while alive, made an active arrangement for how his being would unfold after his death.

He used a legal document — his will — to lock in a mechanism. The mechanism let his money keep working after his death. The way it kept working was not letting his money be spent, but letting his money each year build a specific relation with that year's "work conferring the greatest benefit on mankind."

This is a particular form of "the construct does not close" in Round Six —

Not only the passive non-closing (every generation reading him, igniting his being). The active design of non-closing in advance.

Nobel's will is an engineering. An engineering designed for his own being. An engineering letting him, after his death, continue to choose with whom he would build a relation.

Whom is this engineering for?

It is for the other in the future.

The other in the future is a particular category of other. They do not exist at the same time as I do — when I am alive, they are not yet born; when they are alive, I am already dead. I and they cannot meet. There is no concrete contact between us.

But they will really exist.

Future people, like present people, like past people, are the same kind of existence. They will have specific lives, specific work, specific suffering and joy, specific death. Their existence is not "the future in my concept" — it is real, as real as my present, only I cannot reach it.

Most people treat the other in the future with a default ignoring. That is something for future people to deal with. I cannot help it. I will not be there. These statements sound reasonable. Their actual effect is — to delete the other in the future from the category of "an existence for whom a place must be left."

Nobel did not accept this deletion.

He used his will to say — the other in the future is also other. The arrangements I make while alive can leave a place for those who come after my death. I can let my money build relations with future people after my death — specific relations, once a year, given to specific people for specific work.

This is Round Six's ninth language —

The other in the future also needs to have a place left for them.

The claim sounds simple. Its practical implications are revolutionary.

If the other in the future also needs to have a place left for them, then —

When I make my present decisions, I have to consider their effect on future people. When I leave my estate, I have to consider what that estate will mean to future people. The things I build, write, invent, I have to consider how they will meet future people.

This has structural similarity to many contemporary issues — climate change (the carbon I emit now affects people one hundred years from now), nuclear waste disposal (the waste I produce now must be managed for one hundred thousand years), debt (the money I borrow now is paid back by those who come later), constitutions (the laws I pass now bind people generations after me). All of these are concrete forms of "leaving a place for the other in the future."

Nobel did one of the most concrete versions in the late nineteenth century. He used a will to set up a mechanism that lets his estate meet future people once each year. That mechanism is still operating today. Over a hundred years have passed. It still operates each year.

Nobel himself died long ago. He cannot choose this year's laureate. He cannot agree or disagree with the committees' decisions. His influence on this prize is only one — the five fields he wrote in the 1895 will, the way of distribution, the principle "regardless of nationality." These principles have, for over a hundred years, basically not changed.

Each year's awarding of the Nobel Prize is a fresh execution of that 1895 will. Each fresh execution is a new relation between Nobel's being and that year's specific laureates. Nobel himself has, each year, an opportunity to meet future people — through the mechanism he designed in life.

Kant said: the human is an end, not a means. Levinas said: see the face of the other. Buber said: re-enter the I-Thou. Cao Zhi said: acknowledge that I long, and that I cannot hold. Girard said: see clearly the mechanism of destroying the other, and choose not to participate. Schelling said: acknowledge that within me there is what I cannot wholly absorb. Eckhart said: acknowledge that what cannot be named is real. Rilke said: bear what the other's appearing brings, that one cannot bear. Nobel said: leave a place for those not yet born.

Nine languages. The same direction.

In that direction there is a wind. A mild wind.

VII. The Eternal Unclosing

Nobel died at his villa in San Remo, Italy.

December 10, 1896. A cerebral hemorrhage. He was sixty-three.

On the day he died, no relative was at his side. Both of his older brothers were already dead. He had no wife, no children. A few servants were present — they were Italian; they did not understand the Swedish he spoke at the end.

His last words were in Swedish — one of the servants later said he had heard something like "telegram." Possibly he had wanted a telegram sent. To whom, with what content, no one knows.

He simply died.

A man, in a country not his, in an environment of a language he did not share, no relative at his side, his last word not understood.

If this had been the end, his being would have been remembered in the form of "merchant of death" — that 1888 obituary's image — a wealthy man who had made killing efficient, dying alone abroad.

But this was not the end.

Because what he had done, in those eight years after reading the obituary — those drafts of wills, that correspondence with Bertha von Suttner, those mentions to people around him about a "continuing reward," and finally the handwritten Swedish will of 1895 — all of this began to unfold after his death.

The unfolding was not smooth. The first five years were the legal disputes. Family opposition, royal opposition, divided public opinion. The young Sohlman with a horse-drawn cart, moving the estate from Paris to Stockholm. The Swedish parliament meeting several times to decide what to do.

Finally the unfolding. The first ceremony in 1901.

Then each year.

1. 1. 1. 1904.

Up to today.

Each year was a new specific appearing of Nobel's being.

In 1921 Einstein received the Physics Prize for the photoelectric effect (not for relativity — the committee at the time did not want to award a still-controversial theory). In 1903 Pierre and Marie Curie received the Physics Prize — Marie Curie later, in 1911, also received the Chemistry Prize, becoming the first person to win two Nobel Prizes. In 1954 Linus Pauling received the Chemistry Prize — and then in 1962 the Peace Prize (for his anti-nuclear-weapons work), the first to win Nobels in two different categories on his own. In 1993 Toni Morrison received the Literature Prize — the first African American woman to win the Literature Prize. In 2014 Malala Yousafzai received the Peace Prize — the youngest Nobel Peace Prize laureate in history; she was seventeen that year.

None of these names was chosen by Nobel himself. But each name, through the 1895 will, built a specific relation with Nobel's being.

The Nobel Prize has its controversies. Some awards have been shown by later history to be wrong (in 1935 the Literature Prize went to a second-rate Swedish writer while contemporary Kafka and Joyce were ignored). The Peace Prize has several times gone to people later shown not really to promote peace (1973 to Kissinger, who was at the same time bombing Cambodia). The Literature Prize has been long criticized as too European. All of this is real.

But these controversies do not cancel the mechanism itself. The mechanism is — each year, a group of people with judgement is brought together, and from all that year's candidates picks out what they consider most worthy of being remembered. The judgement will err. But the fact of there being a judgement — is closer to leaving a place for the other than no judgement at all.

Nobel's being keeps appearing in each year's new awarding. Each appearing is not perfect. Each appearing is a specific encounter between the mechanism he designed and the specific human work of that year. Each encounter adds a new line to his being.

To today his construct has not closed. His construct will never close — as long as the Nobel Foundation operates, as long as the prize is given each year, as long as each year someone is bound to that name through important work.

This is the most concrete and largest-scale realization in Round Six of "the construct does not close" —

Hypatia's being unfolds through two thousand years of those who read her. Aquinas's through seven hundred years of theologians and philosophers. Schelling's needed a hundred and fifty years to be caught up with by his time. Eckhart's appeared in new forms over seven hundred years through Tauler, Luther, Heidegger, Suzuki. Rilke's unfolds through every spring morning's reader of his poems.

Nobel's being is manifested once each year through a mechanism he designed himself.

Not passive non-closing. Actively designed non-closing.

A person can do this.

A person can, while alive, take a structural responsibility for his being after his death.

Not to clean his conscience (Nobel never publicly repented his explosives business — he did not consider it wrong). But to give his being more possibilities — so that the form fixed by the 1888 obituary is not the only form, so that future people have another way of meeting him.

Every person who has the capacity to make arrangements can ask —

What kind of unclosing possibility can I leave for my being after I am gone?

It does not have to be on the scale of the Nobel Prize. It can be a gift of books. It can be a letter. It can be a passage of teaching. It can be a tree. It can be some carefully chosen words, left for those who will come, who are not yet born.

Any concrete thing left for future people — anything that lets future people meet me — is a new form of the construct's not closing.

Nobel did one of the largest-scale versions. But every version is real.

VIII. The Bridge

When Nobel walked up, he wore the suit of a late-nineteenth-century European gentleman — a three-piece, dark, plain but of fine cut. He was of medium height. His beard was trimmed short. His eyes were deep-set but tired. His form on the bridge is from the last years of his life — about sixty.

He walked unhurriedly. He had had angina; walking was always done with a certain caution.

He carried a folded sheet in his hand.

Not a book. Not a poem. A legal document — a copy of the will he had signed at the Swedish-Norwegian Club in Paris on November 27, 1895. Four pages of handwritten Swedish. This was the only thing he was willing to bring — his inventions he wished to undo but could not, his businesses had passed away, his poems and play were almost wholly lost.

What he could give was this will — an arrangement made for those not yet born.

He reached the middle of the bridge.

There were more people on the bridge than the last time. Hypatia was there, the astrolabe in her hand. Aquinas, on the other side, his hands empty. Bergson on his cane. Levinas. Buber. Cao Zhi with his bamboo slips. Girard with his book. Schelling with his Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom. Eckhart, hands empty. Rilke, head slightly tilted, listening.

The middle of the bridge was not just these named figures. The bridge held people accumulated from generation to generation — those drawing equations, those watching corn, those writing poems, those reading star charts, those writing novels, those sketching diagrams, those crouching aside taking notes, those sitting and looking into the distance, those speaking quietly with their neighbors.

Nobel nodded to them.

He did not know most of them. In life he had read a great deal, but mainly chemistry and engineering; he had read little poetry, almost no philosophy. He knew a few nineteenth-century scientists — in some places on the bridge he could see them — but he did not know most of those on it.

He did not approach for further talk. He found a place in the middle of the bridge and stood. He set the folded sheet beside him.

At the far end of the bridge, Kant was standing. Tonight Kant was a little clearer than before.

Across from the bridge, on that road, the sky had darkened. Lightning.

There were people on that road, walking.

The ones farthest along were no longer visible.

Closer in — the man in the professor's robe — Heidegger — was still walking.

Nobel looked at that road.

He recognized that road. In life he had known very well what happened on it — he had sold many things to people on that road. He himself had believed that the road would, in the end, halt because weapons became too terrible — he had been wrong. When he signed the will in 1895, the road had not yet reached its furthest point. Later — World War I, World War II, nuclear weapons — the road went to its deepest form, far worse than he had imagined. He had given that road its starting tools through his explosives.

He was not particularly sad. In life he had already known he could not undo the past. What he could do was, within what he could do, leave a different possibility for the future. He had done it.

He turned back. The astrolabe in Hypatia's hand caught the moonlight. The moonlight was mild.

Hypatia looked at him. She was not entirely sure who he was — in her life there had been no dynamite, no transnational corporations, no Nobel Prize. But she saw the folded sheet in his hand — that was an arrangement letting a person, after his death, still meet future people. She knew that gesture.

She nodded to him. Nobel nodded back.

Aquinas came over from the other side. Six hundred years between them. In Aquinas's lifetime there had been no modern legal document like a will — he was a friar; he had no personal estate to leave. But what Aquinas had written, the Summa Theologiae, was itself a kind of thing left for those who came after — read continuously for seven hundred years. Two ways of doing the same kind of work — leaving for those not yet born something concrete that can be met. Aquinas nodded to Nobel. Nobel did not quite know who Aquinas was, but from his bearing he could feel a kind of work he recognized.

Rilke came over. The two had both lived in Paris in the late nineteenth century — they may, in a span of time, have walked the same streets in the same city — but they had not met. Nobel was forty-two years older. When Nobel died, Rilke was twenty-one and just beginning to write.

Rilke knew of Nobel — when Nobel died in 1896, all the European papers carried the news. But Rilke had read no specific material about him in life.

Yet at the bridge Rilke saw the sheet in Nobel's hand. He recognized what it was — something letting one's work, after death, still build relations with future people. This was not what Rilke had done in his life (Rilke wrote poems, letting poems exist as themselves), but the structure was related — both were leaving for those not yet born something concrete that could be met.

Rilke gave Nobel a small smile. Nobel returned it.

The middle of the bridge — many people, the moonlight was mild.

The figure who had always been looking into the distance, the one at the far end of the bridge, looked at Hypatia, at Aquinas, at Bergson, at Levinas, at Buber, at Cao Zhi, at Girard, at Schelling, at Eckhart, at Rilke.

This time he looked at Nobel.

Nobel's eyes met that figure's, briefly.

Nobel did not lower his head. He did something he had done thousands of times in his life — he took the folded sheet from his pocket, opened it slowly, so that the figure who had always been looking into the distance could see the writing.

He was not displaying. He was handing over a document. A document about what he had been able to do at most. A will — a document still in force after his own death.

The figure at the far end nodded, lightly.

Nobel folded the sheet back, returned it to his pocket.

He stood in the middle of the bridge. In life he had been one of the wealthiest people in late-nineteenth-century Europe. The money he had earned would have been enough to buy several cities. But what he really left was not the money itself — it was the mechanism he had built with that money, a mechanism that, after his death, makes his money meet future people once each year.

What he had done was infinite. He knew the infinite was not something he could complete. He had done it anyway.

His construct has not closed. His construct will never close. Because each year — once a year — a group of people gathers to decide what work in that year "conferred the greatest benefit on mankind," and binds his name to that year's laureates. Each binding is a new appearing of his being. Each new appearing covers, once more, the "merchant of death" of the 1888 obituary with a new obituary, written by the specific work of human beings.^[1][2]

Han Qin (秦汉) · @hqinjarsy · Great Lives