Robert Firmage, who I interviewed on this blog two years ago, has died. Robert called himself a Platonist, a Taoist, and a Christian, not always in that order; I knew him as a philosopher; but he wanted above all to give his service to poetry and to that end he labored on translations from German, French, and Latin, from the Augustan era, the Middle Ages, the 19th and 20th centuries.
Robert's service to poetry and to philosophy were two aspects of a single devotion, to a world that always exceeds our capacity to say it, but which by that very token calls forth gesture after gesture, because we are called to love it, and love does not expend itself in its expression. Robert underscored this: "Only if we approach it with love can we understand the world," he insisted, in direct opposition to the scientistic demand for disengagement. This privileging of love, grounded in Plato and in the New Testament, and above all in experience, may sound cliché, but for Robert it was exacting and unsentimental. He worked on his translations with utmost attention to nuance; his philosophy, informed by Einstein, Heidegger, and the I Ching, was attuned to a dispassion as scrupulous any laboratory protocol. But he was also kind and grateful (for all his apparent gruffness); he was devoted to his wife Gertrud -- during every conversation I had on the phone with him, he would mention some care she had shown him, or some detail of their life together which incidentally illustrated his other thinking. And whenever we got together, it was in a cafe where he knew everyone behind the counter by name.
Poetry and philosophy: the praise of life and the study of how to die. I have no doubt that the attention Robert brought to this throughout his life stood him in good stead through the end. I am very grateful for the chance I had to share in his self-effacement and good-humor.
Memory eternal.
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