Prelude: A Telegram
He would later say that “[w]e experience death too much” ().
And so to this young philosopher the Western Union telegram looked like any
other; looked, indeed, not unlike one very dear to him received just over two
years earlier. But now as he pulled the
thin paper from its envelope his [] eyes flicked over his own name, comically
misspelled, to the message itself, to the first four staccato beats of the
brief violet words that meant so much. He was being told, he realized, that on
this Wednesday afternoon of November 2, 1949, Mr. Hill had died:
MR
KONSTANTINE KOLENDER
827
BYRNE ST HOU
MR HILL
DIED THIS AFTERNOON AT GREENVILLE SOUTH CAROLINA
PLEASE
CONTACT PIETER CRAMERUS TELEPHONE JACKSON 8695
PIETER
George A. Hill Jr. was fifty-seven years old when a blood
clot to the brain stopped his heart almost a thousand miles from home. It was reported that the stroke was “caused
by overwork—a word which friends said was never in George Hill’s vocabulary.”[1]
Konstantin Kolenda would live for another forty-two years until his own heart
gave out; but now, twenty-six years old and six months away from taking a
bachelor’s degree in a country not yet his own, Konstantin thought he owed this
man everything.
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