“[Philip] Roth, who passed away last week, will be spending a lot of time with Arendt now, as he will be buried near her in the Bard College cemetery. According to an anecdote related by Bard’s President, Leon Botstein, Roth requested to be buried in the Bard cemetery so we would be able to talk to Arendt in perpetuity.” — Roger Berkowitz 

Philip: Hannah? Hannah? Dr. Arendt? Let’s talk about Irving Howe, can we? I was thinking maybe we could start with him. In 1972, he accused me “thinness of culture, … of ressentiment [and] freefloating contempt and animus.” He said that your Eichmann book demonstrated “surging contempt” and “the supreme assurance of the intellectual looking down” on others. Now, was that fair? Where did he get off accusing us of contempt in such a contemptuous way?

Heinrich [Blücher, Hannah Arendt’s husband, buried to her right]: Wer spricht das? Wer ist da?

Hannah: English, please, Heinrich. You still need to practice your English. It’s just Philip. Philip Roth–the young novelist? Although he actually doesn’t look so young any more. He’s buried on the other side of me now.

Heinrich: What? Forever? Did you agree to this?

Philip: How about Gershom Scholem, Hannah? He accused us both of being self-hating, anti-Semitic Jews. Who made him the arbiter?

Heinrich: Could we talk to Leon about getting this fellow moved somewhere else?

Philip: Hannah, tell me about Berlin in the twenties. [Wistfully] You guys didn’t have to wait ’til the sixties for the sexual revolution, did you? Talk about putting the id back in Yid–you Weimar intellectuals already took care of that. Cafes, cabarets, it must have been great. But Heidegger? What did you see in that old Nazi?

Hannah: Ach, please, both of you. “Death not merely ends life, it also bestows upon it a silent completeness, snatched from the hazardous flux to which all things human are subject.” Can we try a little of that silent completeness for a while?

(See also: The House of Atreus: A Play; and for Gerard Manley Hopkins)