A Cosmic Offense: Elias Canetti's contest against death

Summary

Prior to his absorbing interest in death, Elias Canetti had another intellectual passion that possessed him with equal intensity: crowds. When, on July 15, 1927, the twenty-one-year-old Canetti had his first experience of crowd immersion in Vienna, he realized that it would take him a lifetime of intellectual labor to process what had just happened to him. And, indeed, Crowds and Power, the book he wrote in response to the experience, came out more than three decades later, in 1960. It was worth the wait: Crowds and Power is still one of the most original, insightful, and inspiring works on crowds, in any language. In the second volume of his memoirs, The Torch in My Ear (1982), Canetti describes what he went through on that unforgettable day in 1927. As part of the crowd, he found himself “coping with a state of intoxication, an intensification of possibilities for experience, an increase of the person, who leaves his confines, comes to other persons leaving their confines, and forms a higher unity with them.” Inside the crowd, he discovered a vitality that overwhelmed him from all directions. As he underwent the immersive experience, he had a moment of “illumination”: he found the experience “connected with a special light; it came upon me very suddenly, as a violent feeling of expansion. I was walking down a street in Vienna, with a quick and unusual energetic motion, which lasted as long as the ‘illumination’ itself.” Such an experience makes you feel that your life has become more meaningful—more capacious and less selfish. What happens in a crowd is, at least on one level, the opposite of death. It involves a perceptible feverishness and an intensification of life. As the individual dissolves into the crowd, he gains access to a fuller, more exciting existence. A crowd, by its nature, is an expansive phenomenon, involving more and more people and relying on constant growth for its perpetuation. Since crowds are complicated, dialectical things (“nothing is more...