Let us now praise famous men

The title for this essay came to me as I mulled over what to write about this week. I had heard the phrase before but I failed to recall where it came from exactly. It turned out to be the ironic title of a book by James Agree on tenant farmers in Depression-era America. According to Wikipedia, the phrase is a fragment from a passage in the Wisdom of Sirach, one of the Apocrypha, and reads, in its entirety: “Let us now praise famous men, and our fathers that begat us.” This then is the opportunity I take to do just that, to praise two famous men, each of whose recent passing gave the world, or at least a portion of it, including myself, pause.

Nelson Mandela died in December of last year. His death did not come as a surprise as he was an old man but, nonetheless, it was jarring and the world was thrown into a paroxysm of grief. It was not altogether easy to pinpoint why.  Was it because the man and his legacy, an example of extraordinary personal integrity and endurance and the ending of apartheid, cast a long shadow? Was it because the world recognized that it would never see the like of him again, not just because he was made of the truly unique stuff of greatness but because the world had changed so much so that any kind of similar example of sustained principled dissent would simply be politically co-opted or quickly quashed? It was really hard to tell what the world was grieving about specifically, but grieve it did. I was in Myanmar for work when I heard news of his passing and noticed that the embassies in Yangon were flying their flags at half-mast. A young waiter in the hotel café saw me reading the paper headlining his death and noted to me that he was sad and that Mandela held a special place in the hearts of the Burmese people. Funny that, since this was the very city where Aung San Suu Kyi had made her own long stand.

As I watched his funeral on television, both the raucous, bordering on the absurd one attended by world leaders and the more solemn one in his rural hometown, I thought about what it must have been like to be marooned in a small cell, in a jail, on an island (not too far away but just far enough from the mainland) for years on end, growing old as one’s family, cause and people, basically everything one cared about, went on without you. What would sustain a person in such circumstances? How could one hold on to hope when confronted by cold stone and the unceasing march of time? What would prevent one from falling into bitterness and despair? Those reflections put my own personal woes into perspective, gave lie to the growing belief within me that the only way to go in the face of insurmountable barriers was to give up fighting for a dream that seemed out of reach. For there, a reminder, not just for world leaders but for ordinary men and women, that the same will that sustained Mandela and his compatriots resides in all of us, that it is possible to weave, out of the particular circumstances of our imprisonment and suffering, the very fabric of our own personal growth, strength and freedom.  

Philip Seymour Hoffman died a month ago in ignominious circumstances. It’s been written a thousand times — he died with a needle stuck in his arm. Many people held his death up as a cautionary tale on the scourge of drug addiction, its unpredictability, its ability to overwhelm those it has managed to get a firm grip on. Hoffman had been clean for just over two decades and yet still he succumbed to, by all accounts, a massive bender. There is a poignant and telling piece in The Guardian by Russell Brand, himself a recovering addict, on the seductive power of hard drugs, particularly for those chased by a personal host of demons. Having no experience with that sort of addiction, though plenty with wrestling with the dark, I took from Hoffman’s death both, oddly, relief that he had gotten respite at last from the fight and, what most others did, a sense of loss over what we have been cheated out of getting to see because if you had seen Hoffman in anything, you would know what I mean. The man could take an aspect wan and pudding-like and infuse it with menace (Before the Devil Knows Your Dead), righteous rage and piquant knowingness (Charlie Wilson’s War), folly and defeat (Synecdoche, New York) or dedicated charlatanism and a profound understanding of human nature (The Master). He could be anything that was demanded of him and more, all this over and above his apparent ordinary appearance. He had a singular talent for making you believe he was who he was pretending to be and, in so doing, gave his audiences what they wanted, the experience of truth without actually having to live it. His death reminded me that not all prisons are made of steel, not all enemies flesh and blood and that not all battles are inevitably won.

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