The Last Letter
9 comments
·May 20, 2025bee_rider
dhosek
> he looks like the subject of a modern drivers license photo.
I was reminded of an interview on Fresh Air around 10 years ago or so where a director was talking about going through casting photos looking for people who “looked like“ they belonged in the WWI era. Terry Gross knew exactly what he was getting at (as did I), in that outside of clothes and hairstyle, some people seem to just seem like they belong in different historical contexts (conversely, there are plenty of old portraits of people who see, like they belong more in the 21st century than the 18th).
mxuribe
This is interesting...when my partner and i watch films portraying an older, historic period, we use the term "timeless" or "classic-looking" to refer to some actors who mostly due to their appearance (and maybe a little makeup) can look like they belong in so many different periods. And, then there are other actors, who clearly don't seem like they would fit in periods outside of our own modern day...and this has nothing to do with whether any of the actors look attractive or not...its just a thing that some people have about their appearance (or not).
thrance
OK, so I did a little digging on the guy behind the letter, Huỳnh Khương An [1]. Turns out he was born in Ho Chi Minh City, back when it was called "Saïgon" and a French colony.
He arrived in France between his 12th and 15th birthday, and then became a philosophy professor, and a communist one at that.
This guy was very much an intellectual, which explains the pretty and unusual "Aujourd'hui, j'aurais vécu" (Today, I will have lived). I don't think I've ever seen it elsewhere, so he probably came up with it himself.
His wife was arrested too but survived the war and went on to continue her communist activism.
So yeah, definitely an interesting couple.
[1] https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hu%E1%BB%B3nh_Kh%C6%B0%C6%A1ng...
gitroom
[dead]
Three mostly unrelated thoughts.
1) The photo of Tony Bloncourt seems quite well preserved, and for whatever reason his style seems pretty modern. It somehow creates a bit of cognitive dissonance or something; how could he have been killed by Nazis, he looks like the subject of a modern drivers license photo.
2) It is interesting that, despite being so awful, the Nazis let people write these last letters. I wonder how this tiny bit of humanity survived.
3) I wonder, is the line
> Today, I will have lived.
An expression, part of a well known poem, or something like that, in French? As the article notes
> This turn of phrase, so simple grammatically speaking, is deceptively philosophical because it captures the interval that separates the writer from the reader, the one who will have lived from the one who lives on.
It is a remarkable bit of grammatical sleight of hand to somehow pack so much this much reflection on mortality and life into, basically, a choice of tenses.