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No Other Love: Letters from Richard Feynman to His Late Wife, Arline
- tchalla 5y ago> After the initial fear of a cancer prognosis, Arline was diagnosed with lymphatic tuberculosis in 1941, possibly contracted from unpasteurized milk. I want to take a step back and realise how far humans have come in 80 years.
- orgels_revenge 5y agoHere here. What a great thing to no longer confront in our daily lives.
- scotty79 5y agoIt always irks me how people bash modern food and its safety and glorify all the natural handmade and handpreserved food. Literally zero respect for painstakingly developed processes that save life and health of hundreds of thousands people on daily basis.
- bskinny129 5y agoPlus I believe Feynman’s baby brother died from an infected hangnail. Going off memory from Gleick’s book, so please correct if slightly off.
- gautamcgoel 5y agoThere is something indescribably vulgar about auctioning off a letter a man wrote to his dead wife. I am quite sure that when Feynman penned that letter he had no idea it would eventually be sold by strangers for profit.
- hirundo 5y agoIs it the selling of these historical artifacts that offends you, or just the fact that they have become public documents? I don't think we can categorically call it vulgar to make public the private correspondence of long dead historical figures. They can certainly help us understand those people better. So is it the fact that someone is making a profit from the transaction that you find disturbing? That doesn't bother me. It just transfers the letters from someone who values the money more to someone who values the documents more. I don't find it tasteless or indecent for the previous or new owner to make that judgement.
- 300bps 5y agoNot OP but similarly offended. To me it’s that I assume these items went to a next of kin possibly multiple times to get to a person who cared so little of them that they are cashing in. It’s not just the letters either. His prestigious awards and other things are for sale on that site.
- throwaway894345 5y agoThe answer appears to be pretty plain in the original post: the letters are deeply personal.
- randombits0 5y ago
- toolz 5y agoCan you elaborate how sleeping with many women or enjoying strip clubs is related to "not equating yourself with women"?
- stathibus 5y agoFortunately Feynman is already dead and doesn't have to endure random strangers on the internet reading his personal letters or making sweeping moral judgments about his true nature based on anecdotes.
- option_greek 5y agoAnd that makes it okay to make private communication public? Isn't it hypocrisy to argue to for privacy of the living (HN being pro privacy) but not of the dead.
- globular-toast 5y agoI doubt anyone values the documents that much. They are just another financial instrument now.
- echelon 5y ago
- kaiwen1 5y agoPerhaps it's just too soon? Would you feel the same about Solomon's letters to his (first) wife? Or Mark Antony's letters to Cleopatra?
- BoxOfRain 5y agoI think a reasonable bar is when a person passes out of living memory. Once it’s reasonably likely the last person who knew them is also dead, there’s no material harm that can be done by revealing their correspondence and the benefit to historians would outweigh any potential hurts to living people’s memory of someone.
- kurthr 5y agoAgreed... met the man. Refuse to read the letter.
- ykevinator2 5y agoOn the other hand he knew we were all just carbon and that morality is exclusively a weapon for the living.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- DangitBobby 5y agoWhen my grandmother died, one of her children discovered a box full of correspondence between her and my grandfather while he was in the war. They subsequently turned this collection of letters into a book and published it. I was horrified, but the rest of the family seemed to think it was a great idea. It's a real head-scratcher to me.
- inglor_cz 5y agoI wouldn't be as harsh. We do not really know the entire picture and we are too often primed for outrage nowadays. Perhaps the heirs ran into some serious trouble that can be alleviated with money. If a kid needs an expensive operation or a paralyzed person a better wheelchair, may the letters of the dead help them.
- Buttons840 5y agoIf it makes you feel any better the government was reading his letters, and both parties knew their letters were being read. Not applicable to your complaint in general though.
- gigatexal 5y ago
- amanaplanacanal 5y agoHuh. Mine loves strip clubs.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- throwaway55421 5y agoInterestingly, your wife isn't Feynman's wife.
- pjc50 5y agoI think that was after his first wife died. I do wonder to what extent his later somewhat casual sex attitude was influenced by the traumatic experience of his first deep love dying young.
- mynameisash 5y agoMy understanding is that this attitude predated Arlene's death. In his writings (I think it was What do you care what other people think?), he noted that someone told him Arlene (his then-girlfriend) was 'running around' with other guys. It was an attempt to make him jealous, but he noted that he was dating other girls, so it was only fair. (My phrasing, not his.) It very much sounded like they were both comfortable with their relationship. Granted, this was his writing many years after the fact. I don't think the claims that he was a womanizer are relevant or fair. People say that kind of shit about MLK to discredit him. Similar claims against Feynman don't discount his love for his wife.
- bell-cot 5y agoContrary to stereotypes, many men seem quite capable of both deep, loving devotion...and of enjoying various sorts of commercialized sex (strip clubs, "dirty" magazines, etc., etc.). It makes for a lot of miscommunication and drama.
- 02020202 5y ago
- rurban 5y agoNot his late wife, his first wife, who died early. With his 2nd he took a miss. She was a right-wing radical McCarthyan who denounced him to the FBI as possible Russian spy. His third and late wife was finally ok then.
- redis_mlc 5y ago
- ctchocula 5y agoSmall nitpick. "Late" in this context refers to the fact that she died shortly after Richard sent the letter (definition 2a in [1]) as opposed to a wife he married "late" in his life. [1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/late https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/late