Whistling In the Dark?
Admiral Richard Byrd wrote in Alone, the account of his 1933 solo scientific research project and near-death in the Antarctic, that “across the room in the shadows beyond the reach of the storm lantern, were rows of books, many of them great books, preserving the distillates of profound lives. But I could not read them. The pain in my eyes would not let me.”
The world learned later that the pain in his eyes was from carbon monoxide poisoning. “Could I but read,“he wrote, “the hours would not seem half so long, the darkness half so oppressive, and my minor misfortunes half so formidable.”
What a paean to reading and to the lessons available from profound lives. His book, this very book, would become the same kind of inspirational distillate for later generations.
I’m grateful for many profound lives and their impact on me. One who came to mind the other day was Howard Zinn, historian, Boston University professor and author of A People’s History of the United States, among a host of other books. If you haven’t yet read APHOTUS, you may remember the scene in Good Will Hunting where the book is invoked. Matt Damon asks his therapist (Robin Williams) “You want to read a good book? Read Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States. That book’ll knock you on your ass.”
I had the privilege of actually getting to know Howard (who had, until then, been a hero only at a distance), because he was a regular shopper at my first Whole Foods, in Newtonville, Massachusetts. When I finally put name to face of this distinguished elder, I started to chat him up and liked him enormously. I read more of his books, just to honor and take advantage of his presence. I remember once saying to him that I enjoyed his volume A Power Governments Cannot Suppress. His response was “Be careful, that stuff will just mess with your head. What I want to know is who’s going to be the fifth starter for the Red Sox.”
And then he became even more of a hero. He would rather talk about baseball, the Sox, who’s pitching tonight, and how he got to sit in Theo’s box (that’s Epstein, the General Manager who was at the helm when the Red Sox broke the 86-year curse in 2004). At the end of the day it was baseball he loved and he wanted to talk about it with me.
“An optimist isn’t necessarily a blithe, sappy whistler in the dark. To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic… If we remember those times and places where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction.”
Zinn wrote that in the aforementioned A Power Governments Cannot Suppress. Blithe and sappy are two words that also characterize how I used to feel about gratitude. Oh, that’s nice, that’s sweet, write down all the things you’re grateful for. Say grace before meals. Say thank you to the man, honey. That was before I knew there was a serious inquiry here, a muscular one, a life-changing one that would require nothing less than real intention and a full “yes” to all of it and would not allow for cherry-picking the “good” things that happen from the “bad” things.
I’m grateful for the chance to remember Howard Zinn and my too-brief friendship with him, before he died in 2010. Longfellow said it well. “Lives of Great Men all remind us, we can make our lives sublime, and, departing, leave behind us, footprints on the sands of time.”
