No Other Love: Letters from Richard Feynman to His Late Wife, Arline | Hacker News Reader

No Other Love: Letters from Richard Feynman to His Late Wife, Arline

sothebys.com

82 pointsStratoscope44 comments

There 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.

Is 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.

Not 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.

The answer appears to be pretty plain in the original post: the letters are deeply personal.

I doubt anyone values the documents that much. They are just another financial instrument now.

Just wait until they auction off the frozen body of Ted Williams in a hundred years or so. The moral questions over private correspondence will pale in comparison.

I imagine if buying dead people becomes as commonplace as buying art, some future Cards Against Humanity performative comedy outfit might try an analogously outrageous "cut up a Picasso" stunt.

Which is all to say that selling love letters is relatively tame in the scheme of all the things that happen after we die.

Look up Body Worlds. The owner has been obtaining bodies primarily from China, plasticizing them, and displaying them all over the world (primarily in the US) charging public admission for all to see.

There is significant controversy and speculation about the origin of the bodies themselves, such as being Chinese political agitators and/or originating from “camps”. Some “returned” bodies clearly died of head trauma, others of bullet wounds. Two doctors in Russia were charged with supplying 56 bodies without consent that included homeless and mentally ill.

> They can certainly help us understand those people better.

What exactly do you think you would learn about Feynman that is so important you feel your right to his personal correspondence to his wife outweighs his privacy (even from the grave).

It’s not a new or novel debate, one of the more famous discussions on the topic would be the publication of the diary of Anne Frank. Unlike Feynman she wasn’t a historical figure, until after publication of her diary. If you agree with the publication do you object to the decision to withhold publication of a number of pages and if so on what basis?

It’s also not entirely unrelated to archeology/grave robbing. What exactly gives people/governments the right to dig up and loot tombs? Courts are still trying to figure out the remedies where those bodies/artifacts were taken by foreign governments and are currently being proudly displayed in foreign museums to the public. Presumably you might think it tasteless to go down to a local cemetery and begin digging up graves in search for jewelry and personal affects, but would being a “historical figure” really change your mind? Do you not see the connection? If not what is your moral distinction since you don’t think it’s tasteless so long as the market is deciding the value?

They're dead, they're beyond caring. Honestly this "sanctity of the dead" concept is a bit antiquated. Cremate the bodies, recycle the physical goods, move on.

You should apply chesterton's fence to long-standing social traditions like this. There are certainly compelling reasons to respect the dead's wishes, even if the reasons are not apparent to you personally.

Chesterton's fence is hard to apply in a vacuum, especially for subjective matters. Got any clues as to where to start?

If not, this is just like when business people talk about "scalable" in meetings. Means nothing without more info.

I think it's less sanctity of the dead and more consent on what is allowed to be published. It's a fair argument. If I stumble across someone's messages to their ex-girlfriend who is now well-renowned in my circles, am I allowed to publish them? If they're dead does it really impact the ethics?

Privacy of their personal information is now well and truly something for the famous to consider codifying it in their Will going forward...

Much like in the Google/Meta dominated online world, the default is opt-in, it'd seem, as that likely generates capital such "estates" need, to survive.

> If they're dead does it really impact the ethics?

Yes? I feel pretty comfortable saying that the live/dead status of the author (and subjects) is one of many factors that affects the ethics involved in publishing something like that. That seems to be the question of this thread, no?

Yet you evade the most obvious question of how would the children (and grandchildren) of the dead would feel about such usage of their remains, may it be a letter or a 4K private sex tape.

Eh? If my grandmother's sex "tapes" (we're probably talking 16mm film) are circulating, good for her! I sincerely hope she had a more excitement in her life than simply raising kids in the depression. I would be proud.

How would my child feel about videos of me and/or his mother? I'm pretty sure just as squicked as any kid will be about the idea of their parents having sex. Which they all know we do. You pretend otherwise to your kids?

The question is, is someone allowed to make that choice for you, ever? I think not, and it's still a question much in debate, which we have made an excellent demonstration of here.

The debate is pretty clearly settled as both a matter of law and a matter of fact - Feynman's estate sold the letters. If you're the legal owner of your grandmother's intimate notes, you can make your own choice.

You may not care, yet Humans have codified an entire body of law known as estate planning to see deceased's wishes carried out.

Do you not have an estate plan on the basis once you’re dead you are beyond caring? Or do you have an estate plan but feel it is ok to violate on the basis you will be beyond caring and there is no sanctity of the dead?

Why even suggest cremation? Such a preference seems to contradict being beyond caring.

I hope someone publishes the sex tapes of your grandparents 33 years after their death to help you put things into perspective, or perhaps you really believe what you are saying and would consider the enjoyment of those videos by strangers as "recicling".

Honestly, the best people to make that kind of judgement would be the person's personal relatives. It seems like Feynman's estate is selling the objects, it's not like someone robbed his grave.

One of the problems here is that the Feynman estate has a significant conflict of interest when making this decision: namely, they get money from it.

> the best people to make that kind of judgement would be the person's personal relatives

To expand on that the best person to make this kind of judgement would be Feynman himself.

But then I'm not sure if had he ever made a claim on whether he would allow these letters to become public / be sold, if such a claim would have any legal value to be enforced after his death.

In the end we are left with his personal relatives, and what the law regulates regarding their rights to share Feynman private letters posthumously.

Perhaps 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?

I 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.

Agreed... met the man. Refuse to read the letter.

On the other hand he knew we were all just carbon and that morality is exclusively a weapon for the living.

When 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.

I 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.

If 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.

> 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.

Here here. What a great thing to no longer confront in our daily lives.

It 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.

Plus I believe Feynman’s baby brother died from an infected hangnail. Going off memory from Gleick’s book, so please correct if slightly off.

Not 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.

Small 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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com