Could an editorial for a celebratory year be given a more all-embracing title?
     This is the 40th year of publication of Books from Finland, and we shall be celebrating the anniversary with a number of articles on the subject — otherwise, it is business as usual; life goes on. We are not, in other words, feeling in any way melancholy in the Books from Finland editorial office, even if many of the texts in this issue treat the theme of... death.
     As Torsti Lehtinen remarks in his essay, 'Death is the spice of life'!

We western urbanites know that death has been institutionalised. Hospital machines support the last moments of life, and then our mortal clay becomes the responsibility of the funeral contractors. Of course death has been and is still a communal matter: it is announced in the newspapers, funerals and memorial services are held with greater or lesser pomp and circumstance, and relatives and friends are invided.
     Recent years and decades, however, have seen the spread of a form of collective grieving that astonishes me.
     I do not know where it began, but in the Nordic countries, at least, we remember the murder of the Swedish prime minister in 1986, and how the scene of the crime was covered in flowers. The death of Princess Diana in 1997 prompted a veritable outpouring of flowers and memorial objects. In both places, the location of the death itself is of greater importance than the grave, and is still remembered.
     Perhaps it is understandable for citizens to express there emotions when a public figure dies in dramatic circumstances. The phenomenon has, however, given rise to others. When a bank robber shot two policemen in Helsinki, flowers and candles appeared on the scene in a moment. A year ago two labourers fell from some scaffolding, and flowers were brought to the scene of the accident. Near my home, a taxi collided with a traffic sign, and the passenger died. Bunches of flowers were taped to the post the same day.
     I do not believe that the flowers were provided by the grieving and stunned relatives. They were brought by people who had heard about the events thorugh the media.
     Perhaps some people believe it to be beautiful and moving that the scene of an accident or a crime is remembered, but in my opinion there is something strange here, even macabre. The death of an unknown person is turned into a stage for sympathy and spectacle. The phenomenon is comparable to reality television: it is a way of making a simulacrum of sorrow — without danger.

A television viewer encounters death every day, both in the news and in fiction, but wars and catastrophes are distant events compared to a public death in one's own neighbourhood. Flowers, cards and teddy-bears bridge the emotional chasm that yawns between a distant death in its disturbing abstractness and the death of someone who is close
— in the last analysis the closest of all, one's own death.
     I suppose these unknown bearers of flowers could also be compared to the classical chorus or the Finnish lamenters of former times — it is just that I take an unnecessarily sour attitude to the phenomenon.
     One's own genuine grief can render one speechless; the verses used in death notices are not merely conventional; those who grieve feel that a short poem expresses their feelings touchingly. That is what poetry can do, in sorrow or joy.

Kristina Carlson
Editor-in-Chief