In my life, I have been largely spared from the intrusive relentlessness of death in my family and among those closest to me. Those who have died have followed the normal course of life and thus have not created immediate and agonising emptiness. The exception is he who was my best friend for over 40 years, Björn Boring. It was also he who led me to Martin Hägglund’s philosophy long before Martin’s book This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom ended up on all the country’s cultural pages.
Björn had then not only somehow found the book but also been captured by the book’s message and despite the fact that it was only available in English at the time and Björn was about as bad as I am at reading books at a relatively high level of abstraction in a language other than Swedish, he became almost obsessed with the book’s message about life’s inexorable limitation and the invincibility of death. That at the same time he was personally grimly reminded of the finitude of life, by the return of the cancer he thought he had defeated, was a decisive factor.
He immediately contacted me, and nothing was more natural than for us to start reading the book together, as we had done so many times before with texts by Marx and Plato and books about the most important issues of destiny in our time. Reading together and continuously discussing the text was in this case extra rewarding and necessary for us to be able to make the effort to understand this rather extensive philosophical basic text. I too was directly affected by the compelling logic and existential seriousness of the book. Ten years earlier I had suffered a life crisis that was decisive for me when in my life I suddenly became more aware of the constant presence of death in life and in an interview book about my life the author had therefore chosen to begin my story with Confucius’ words that all people have two lives and that the second begins when we realize that we only have one.
Our reading of Hägglund then came during this last year of Björn’s life to run parallel to death and when the book was to be published in Swedish in 2020 and Martin Hägglund was to come from New York for the launch in Sweden, I contacted him and told him about the book’s significance to Björn. We quickly agreed that in connection with this visit to Sweden we would try to arrange a meeting with Björn, and it was decided and planned, but three days before Martin’s arrival Björn’s life ended.
Björn’s parents met at sea where his father Kalle worked as a cook and his mother Randi as a cold-buffet manageress. Kalle was from Småland and lived a long and eventful life while Randi died of cancer at the age of 49. She was an illegitimate child from Northern Norway and Björn told me with his usual inimitable humour that when Björn had claimed his right to his mother’s share of the inheritance, his mother’s half-sister had stood up and said indignantly in front of everyone: “Well, that’s the thanks to being born within wedlock!”
Björn grew up on Hisingen, played football with Glenn Hysén and the other boys on the same yard and frivolled his way through school until high school where he had the doctorated lecturer and historian Lars Linge as his history teacher. He somehow got Björn interested in something more than GAIS and in joking his way through life. After a few years as a bus driver where he learned to drink scalding hot coffee during the five-minute breaks at the end stops by drawing cold air under his tongue in a special way while swallowing, he started studying history at Gothenburg University at the same time as me. He had by then also had a lightning-fast career as a sewage worker, which had to be interrupted after he accidentally pressed the reverse flush button while emptying a summer cabin’s septic tank, which was not discovered until the basement was full, and shit started to seep out between the threshold and the front door.
As students, Björn and I quickly became friends, although he took reading the course literature with the same ease as everything else in life and, to my undisguised amazement, did not even excerpt and, like me, wrote compendiums on all the textbooks, but very quickly then a three-grade essay in history about Swedish inequality and the unreasonable power of the fifteen families over the lives of ordinary people. At the same time, he had also, without first consulting me, to my horror, joined the R’s and thus, in my eyes, became the wrong kind of communist and started selling The Proletarian.
With his usual enthusiasm, he had also brought along his father Kalle, who in turn became a legendary propagandist with the specialty of imperceptibly managing to insert leaflets from the Communist Party into each individual copy of Expressen in the newspaper rack at Konsum every week. Despite our somewhat different leftist turns in life, on my initiative we came to read Jan Myrdal together thoroughly, which Björn at that time had some difficulty legitimizing within his party, but for our continued intellectual journey this became crucial.
Instead of driving a bus and emptying septic tanks, Björn, like me, chose teaching, which we both thought was the most honourable work one could pursue. Even if one simultaneously became a cog in the government’s ideology production, one could create some space there to spread the seeds of rebellion and the sweet lure of reason in working-class children, we reasoned. Björn soon started working at Komvux, where he for several decades became an inspiration for many people, who were receptively looking for a new start in life.
Before every course in history, social studies and religion, which were Björn’s subjects throughout his long teaching career, he came out of intellectual curiosity and in order not to freeze in ingrained trains of thought, to always read a few more books on the very subject that was to be conveyed again. Incidentally, it was also here that he found his Maria who sings for us today and during the time of this love’s maturation process I managed to get quite tired of Björn’s long explanations about the character and lustre of the complexion of this strangely unique student.
Well, our meetings and intellectual chats continued, and he always made plenty of time for this. Despite a growing obligation to provide for the two children Ida and Elma, newly produced with Maria, Björn had continued to create for himself what Hägglund calls free time, not to be confused with the leisure time that is used solely to be able to reproduce one’s own labour force and because of that , due to fatigue and laziness, is often neglected and wasted on simpler kinds of entertainment. Our society is infinitely effective when it comes to that type of, according to Björn, empty allurements of consumerism and escapism.
Because of this very longing for truly free time, Björn consciously never worked full-time but always part-time with lower pay in a thus forced but self-chosen war against the unnecessary things of the consumer society. He therefore wanted free time to be able to devote himself to the life Marx believed we humans were actually meant for, to the essentials of life such as love, educational conversations, making music, dancing salsa and reading even demanding, thick books that were sometimes only available in foreign languages.
Björn’s desire to convey this fundamentally very serious view of the meaning of life met with both successes and occasional setbacks. I will never forget Björn’s despairing expression on his face after once, in front of my eyes, he had read aloud to his daughter Ida from Sven Wernström’s strongly didactic appeal against the consumer society, Max Svensson Lurifax and after finishing the reading, he looked expectantly at his beloved five-year-old daughter who then, somewhat suspiciously, summarized what she thought she had heard with the words: “I love shopping”. It was one of the few times I saw Björn become genuinely angry and roar at his then suddenly frightened daughter: “You don’t know what the hell shopping is! We’ve never done it a single damn time!” After this incident, this deeply educational experience was constantly present in our discussions about the ways in which the poison of consumerism creeps into all of our souls.
As an educator, however, Björn succeeded far more often than he failed. When I was preparing this speech and asked my now 49-year-old son Erik how and why Björn came to play such an enormous role in his life from early childhood until their last meeting in Erik’s home, where just a few days before Björn’s death they would sit together in complete common certainty of Björn’s impending death and sometimes cry and sometimes laugh noisily, Erik gave me some examples. He said: If you, like Björn, could sow a seed in a ten-year-old that made him happily embrace the world’s most boring sport for such a ten-year-old, namely long-distance running, then you are in some way a magical educator.
Erik, who today, 40 years later, runs a marathon in 2:45, also told of the enormous, surprised relief he felt as a child when he first heard Björn react to one of his father’s long and assertive explanations about how one must of course behave in a certain situation. It was an explanation of the kind Erik had always been taught to listen to and accept as if it were God speaking. Björn had let out a loud roar of laughter at my serious sermon that time and after this incident, Erik said, this Björn’s roar of laughter was always with him as a secret companion and friend when he was forced to listen to my assertive morality tales for the rest of his childhood.
When Björn, at the age of 60, chose to step down further from wage slavery in order to have even more free time for truly human life in the sense of Marx and Hägglund, came the illness and with that the accompanying accentuated awareness of life’s inexorable end became even clearer and increasingly impossible for him to turn his gaze away from. This last year of Björn’s life was filled with our close reading of Martin Hägglund’s book This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom which then helped Björn experience an intensity and deepened presence in every second that delighted and lifted him, even though life was constantly and increasingly fluctuating between hope and despair.
I will never forget the death anxiety I encountered in Björn’s gaze in the hospital the day before his death. It has forced me to reread Hägglund’s book every year in the following years and not only sharpen my view of the world but also strengthen my conviction of both the necessity and the possibility of creating a completely different world than the unworthy one we live our lives in today, a world where capitalism’s inherent pursuit of growth controls our lives and risks eradicating humanity as a species in war, climate crisis and the pursuit of profit. Björn always believed that the only possible alternative was resistance, always resistance!