I have always wondered at the passion many people have to meet the celebrated.
The prestige you acquire by being able to tell your friends that you know famous men proves only
that you are yourself of small account. The celebrated develop a technique to deal with the persons
they come across. They show the world a mask, often an impressive on,
but take care to conceal their real selves.
They play the part that is expected from them, and with practice learn to play it very well,
but you are stupid
if you think that this public performance of theirs corresponds with the man within.
I have been attached, deeply attached, to a few people;
but I have been interested in men in general
not for their own sakes,
but for the sake of my work. I have not, as Kant enjoined, regarded each man as an end in himself,
but as material that might be useful
to me as a writer. I have been more concerned with the obscure than with the famous.
They are more often themselves.
They have had no need to create a figure to protect themselves from the world or to impress it.
Their idiosyncrasies have had more chance to develop in the limited circle of their activity,
and since they have never been in the public eye it has never occurred to them that they have
anything to conceal.
They display their oddities because it has never struck them that they are odd. And after
all it is with the common run of men that
we writers have to deal; kings, dictators, commercial magnates are from our point of view
very unsatisfactory.
To write about them is a venture that has often tempted writers, but the failure that has
attended their efforts
shows that such beings are too exceptional to form a proper ground for a work of art. They
cannot be made real.
The ordinary is the writer’s richer field. Its unexpectedness, its singularity,
its infinite variety afford unending material.
The great man is too often all of a piece; it is the little man that is a bundle
of contradictory elements. He is inexhaustible.
You never come to the end of the surprises he has in store for you. For my part
I would much sooner spend a month
on a desert island with a veterinary surgeon than with a prime minister.
I believe in the 50-percent theory. Half the time things are better than normal;
the other half, they re worse.
I believe life is a pendulum swing. It takes time and experience to understand
what normal is, and that gives me the perspective to
deal with the surprises of the future.
Let’s benchmark the parameters: yes, I will die. I’ve dealt with the deaths of both parents,
a best friend,
a beloved boss and cherished pets. Some of these deaths have been violent,
before my eyes, or slow and agonizing.
Bad stuff, and it belongs at the bottom of the scale.
Then there are those high points: romance and marriage to the right person;
having a child and doing those Dad
things like coaching my son’s baseball team, paddling around the creek in
the boat while he’s swimming with the dogs,
discovering his compassion so deep it manifests even in his kindness to snails,
his imagination so vivid he builds
a spaceship from a scattered pile of Legos.
But there is a vast meadow of life in the middle, where the bad and the
good flip-flop acrobatically. This is what
convinces me to believe in the 50-percent theory.
One spring I planted corn too early in a bottomland so flood-prone that
neighbors laughed. I felt chagrined at the
wasted effort. Summer turned brutal---the worst heat wave and drought
in my lifetime. The air-conditioned died;
the well went dry; the marriage ended; the job lost; the money gone.
I was living lyrics from a country tune---music I loathed.
Only a surging Kansas City Royals team buoyed my spirits.
Looking back on that horrible summer, I soon understood that all
succeeding good things merely offset the bad.
Worse than normal wouldn’t last long. I am owed and savor the
halcyon times. The reinvigorate me for the next nasty
surprise and offer assurance that can thrive. The 50-percent
theory even helps me see hope beyond my Royals’ recent slump,
a field of struggling rookies sown so that some year soon we can reap an October harvest.