"According to tradition, Virgil traveled to Greece around 19 BC to revise the Aeneid. After meeting Augustus in Athens and deciding to return home, Virgil caught a fever while visiting a town near Megara. Virgil crossed to Italy by ship, weakened with disease, and died in Brundisium harbour on 21 September 19 BC, leaving a wish that the manuscript of the Aeneid was to be burned. Augustus ordered Virgil's literary executors, Lucius Varius Rufus and Plotius Tucca, to disregard that wish, instead ordering the Aeneid to be published with as few editorial changes as possible. As a result, the existing text of the Aeneid may contain faults which Virgil was planning to correct before publication. However, the only obvious imperfections are a few lines of verse that are metrically unfinished (i.e., not a complete line of dactylic hexameter). Other alleged "imperfections" are subject to scholarly debate."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeneid#Virgil's_death,_and_edi...
I don't really mean this as an accusation, but I suspect these death-bed demands are simply a pose. Not that they are essentially insincere, but rather a final gesture of conscientiousness that should be ignored.
What is lost to the world by retaining the imperfect, incomplete?
Otherwise, they wouldn't spend months and years meticulously editing and improving their works before release.
It's uncomfortable, embarrassing even, to have your unfinished work consumed and reviewed as if it were finished, and as if it were an accurate measure of your intentions and talent.
Yes, but when the unfinished work is published, it is well known that it was incomplete.
That said, I can understand the author not wanting it to be published. If is a shitty thing to publish it against the author's will when they are alive, it is equally shitty to do it when they have died.
It's definitely not _equally_ shitty. It's arguable whether it's shitty at all. For an action to be a shitty thing to do, someone must suffer as a result.
I can see a couple of ways to argue that the author's beneficiaries might suffer, and perhaps even that the author themself might suffer depending on your religious beliefs.
But surely it's not anywhere close to _equally_ shitty.
I am firmly on the side of releasing everything. Great works of art are so incredibly valuable (to the culture) that the chance of finding one that might have been missed trumps these other concerns.
GP mentioned that most of Kafka's best works would have been destroyed if his stated wishes were honored (it is debatable whether these were his actual wishes).
A web search turns up that Monet destroyed a lot of his works before he passed.
How many Aeneid's are we 'missing' because the author was successful in destroying their unfinished work?
Does somebody suffer if you urinate on the grave of a random person who died a hundred years ago? Is it a shitty thing to do?
If the intent is to insult a group of people or that person’s descendants, yes. If not, honestly, no. Which is why we generally chase drunk teenagers out of graveyards instead of jailing them.
(I acknowledge this is specious!)
Society suffers, because people do not wish to be subjected to the sight and smells associated with urination.
A cemetery is usually something of a public park, of sorts. Urinating on a random grave is around the same order of shittiness as urinating on any part of a public park meant to be appreciated or contemplated by people.
If the grave of the random person matters a lot to you, ask yourself, would it matter if the headstone were not there? Would it matter if you did not know there was a grave there?
Every time you urinate on the ground, you are urinating on the remains of millions of people.
With every breath you take, you are inhaling the remains of everyone who has ever been cremated longer ago than it took for their burn gases to homogeneously mix in into the atmosphere (which really does not take very long).
Just as a rose by any other name is still a rose, shit is still shit no matter how you frame it, and unfortunately shit tends to stick better than roses.
I wonder how many devs on here publish their feature branches prior to merge? Do they push up all the WIPs too?
>It is unlikely that Marcus Aurelius ever intended the writings to be published.
It is lore that one of his jesters burned himself to save the writings from a fire.
Are we lucky, or was Kafka unlucky?
I find the lack of respect about authors' wishes very shocking.
That said, I do think once someone is dead, there's some argument whether you have to respect that. But I at least understand the desire.
Of course, a movie studio is almost certain to finish off a movie if a director dies and may remove them for other reasons.
It works better if there is mutual respect.
My point though is when generalizing and reframing this about the deceased vs living, more often than not, it is no longer about respecting (even respectfully disagreeing) with the creative and more about disrespecting the deceased.
If it's a studio film, they may well fire the director and hire a new one. And, of course, screenwriters are casually script doctored with or without their consent.
With books, the balance of power isn’t so skewed to the publisher, though I suppose it depends on what it is.
I don’t know what circumstances Tolkien’s unfinished work was released, though it seems like his son toiled away at them for years.
I always assumed Christopher Tolkien had some sort of "do with them what you think best" agreement with his father although I don't actually know. Not that there's anything particularly special in written word beyond Tolkien's originals.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symphony_No._8_(Schubert)#Earl...
Frankly, all I'd ask of a literary executor would be that they 1) humor my requests while I'm alive, 2) respect the wishes of my family. Other than that, whether they actually follow through on my wishes? Put it this way, if I find myself in an afterlife, as an atheist, I doubt whether my executor stuck my wishes will be high on my list of things to care about. And without an afterlife it's not as if I'd be able to care. Or know,
I mean they’re dead right? Everything meaningful and special about them is gone.
The corpse doesn’t know if it was desecrated nor does it know if it was subject to necrophilia. So if desecrating a corpse is “ok” according to the above commentators, why is necrophilia not ok too? And if necrophilia is not ok, then perhaps there’s a flaw in their argument.
That is, some things are morally wrong, even if there is no apparent “victim” as the victim is dead.
To be fair, I have practiced shaivasana (“corpse pose”), specifically including “corpse don’t care” as a response to existential anguish arising and passing. But I also know quite a good bit about what it means to regret and long for second chances or a path not taken. I think it is quite rare for anyone (regardless of beliefs) to die without regrets. If you are able to pull that off for yourself, I’m glad for you.
In a belief system where there is a Creator, and the Creator is a Mother, all of Creation are her children. Thus, as humans, raising and nurturing a child is as much of an act of creation as art, music, etc. And conversely, our artistic creations tend to develop a life of its own.
That means it's illegal to not respect the dead person's wishes. The copyright is theirs, not their descendant's.
> In the Realms of the Unreal is a 15,145-page work bound in fifteen immense, densely typed volumes (with three of them consisting of several hundred illustrations, scroll-like watercolor paintings on paper derived from magazines and coloring books) created over six decades. Darger illustrated his stories using a technique of traced images cut from magazines and catalogues, arranged in large panoramic landscapes and painted in watercolors, some as large as 30 feet wide and painted on both sides. He wrote himself into the narrative as the children's protector.[3]: 64
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Darger#In_the_Realms_of_...
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johannes_Brahms#Works ("...once claimed to have destroyed 20 string quartets before he issued his official First in 1873...")
Bind the executor to a contract before hand? Perhaps have two additional watchdog entities setup to sue if the executor disobeys? Have a smart contract oracle escrow on the blockchain to automatically pay out to the law firm for suit if the number of ISBNs associated with your name increases?