The German poet Friedrich Schiller supposedly liked to write with a drawer filled with rotting apples tucked into his desk. The smell was overpowering, but he couldn’t write without it. Apparently, it got the words flowing.
How could that possibly be the case? Maybe it was just a weird quirk or a fetish. Maybe it was a weird part of his writing routine (more on those here). Or maybe, the proximity to decay was an inspiring metaphor, a sort of aromatic memento mori.
Marcus Aurelius once wrote a strange meditation along those lines:
The stench of decay. Rotting meat in a bag.
Look at it clearly. If you can.
Life is that stench, he was saying. We are the rotten meat in a skin bag. From the second we’re born, time starts ticking towards our expiration date. A lot of people want to turn away from that. They want to pretend it’s not real. We’ve gotten very good over the millennia at coming up with ways to help us pretend and to turn away. It’s why so many people are unproductive—they think they can afford to be, because they’re in denial of their mortality and the fact that life is rot, rot, rotting away as they sit there dicking around.
Maybe that’s what the awful smell of fermenting apples did for Schiller. We’ll never really know, but it’s a powerful reminder for us this morning, nonetheless.
Memento mori. Tempus fugit.
Grab it while it’s here.
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