Those who opened their eyes when I did are closing them now. Word reached me on New Year's Eve of two friends, one who has died, another who has returned home from hospital for palliative care. The first memories that come into my mind is of them laughing. I believe anyone who knew them would say the same thing. In my exploring years, when I was young and healthy and life was still ahead, they were stars in my sky, who had always been alive and would always be alive, because that is how we must act if we are to live at all.
I cannot cry anymore. Why, I do not completely understand. It must have something to do with losing my voice. A few tears sometimes come, but the shuddering sobbing, as when I buried my face in a pillow when my father died, or fell on my knees at my mother's bedside, or embraced a friend at the grave of Bob Zonka--that's over with. I sat here and looked at my memories.
That began early this morning. Awake around seven, I choose to doze a little. My mind began to poke around in my undergraduate years, in a stream of thought about discoveries I'd made at University. Perhaps this was inspired by the new documentary "Paul Goodman Changes My Life." Goodman's book Growing Up Absurd was a bible for the 1960s generation. And his The Community of Scholars described an ideal university which was not walled within specialist areas but encouraged students to explore the riches of life.In Urbana I attended events unceasingly. Movies, plays, concerts, the folk song club, poetry readings, visiting lecturers, political meetings, football and basketball games. During my doze I remembered how full my life was then. And how my shelves filled with the books I learned about in class or found on the shelves of every bookstore. So much truth, grace and inspiration to be found.
I met the friend who died at the annual Conference on World Affairs at Boulder, which I attended for about 35 years. For a week every spring I was barraged by panel discussions, surrounded by interesting people, made lifetime friends, attended concerts and plays, plundered used book stores, met people from all over the world. All of them involved in thinking, asking, discovering. Just as many opportunities were available in Chicago as in Boulder, but in Chicago I was always busy. It struck me that I could retire happily in Boulder or another place with a good university and a smaller population. The reason my Boulder friends all seemed so current and involved was that, in a sense, they were still at college. It must be the same in all good college towns. One hears of Madison, Austin, Missoula, Bloomington. Urbana.
To the degree it is possible, I've tried to live my life as an undergraduate still rummaging around in the world, and so I met others who did, too. I found a passenger to share the voyage, and married her. At the newspaper there were many others still rummaging, because what is a newspaper reporter but someone who wants a license to go places and ask questions of strangers? My friend in palliative care was in journalism all his life--writing, editing, broadcasting, teaching, publishing. Laughing. Getting together. Staying in touch. Being a friend.
That book Bowling Alone has a title which haunts me. All over America, the walls are going up. People do not mix and associate as much, join as many clubs, get in the swim. We have the right to privacy, but we no longer feel we have the right to go next door and pay an unannounced call. We get looked at strangely. Why are we there? If you say, "I just thought I'd visit my next door neighbor," you get looked at strangely, even with fear.
When we're born we find ourselves on board Planet Earth for a voyage of undetermined destination and duration. It is a very big ship. At first we see only a few passengers, then more and more. There are many decks. We never see some passengers, but we hear about them, and they enroll among the living in our minds. Some come attached with relationships ("Your Uncle Charlie in Taylorville"). Some with titles ("Sir Winston Churchill"). Some with functions ("Joe DiMaggio from the Yankees"). Some with such accomplishments their names say enough ("Ernest Hemingway." "Louis Armstrong." "President Roosevelt." "Albert Einstein"). All of those people were on board when I joined the cruise. All have died. One purpose of an education is to create an interest in the people who were former passengers. What was the ship like for them when they were on board?
With our friends, the gift of life is taken for granted. We can pick up the phone. We'll see each other next time. Every Friday night. Every Thanksgiving. Same place, next year. They will always revolve into view. Then the first important person dies. For me, that was my father. It was an enormous event. It wasn't supposed to happen. In the years to come the annual losses began to grow, until I passed a tipping point and knew more dead people than living ones. Should I be packing my bags for disembarkation?Life on this planet has consisted in an unbroken chain of creatures striving to live and reproduce. At some level, even a very elementary one, this has involved curiosity: What must I as an organism do in order to succeed? In the evolution of species an important step comes with the development of boredom. If life consists only of eating and reproducing, one's existence is jam-packed. Boredom presents the problem of unemployed time, and how to fill it. From boredom has grown human civilization and all of its arts and sciences.
The friends I mentioned at the beginning were not bored or boring. They were curious. Choose your best friends among those who bring something to the party. It's not so easy to make new ones. As you grow older, a relentless narrowing takes place, until if you grow old long enough you're reduced to your original state when you first boarded the vessel: Those who feed and care for you.
The news about these two friends drew the noose a little closer. As their names come into my mind, they are no longer on the passenger list. It gets lonely. George Burns was told to date girls his age. "There are no girls my age." For all of us, there are fewer and fewer people our age. Who wants to be the last one on board? I am happy I knew them. They were happy they knew me. We made it a little less boring.
Apologies for getting off-topic, but for any other readers who may have forgotten the name, the watch face is an example of the Droste effect.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Droste_effect
The watch image can be found here:
http://pbmo.wordpress.com/2011/02/17/droste-effect/
A New Yorker cartoon of a Russian nesting doll (matryoshka doll) getting an ultrasound exam:
http://recursivelyrecursive.wordpress.com/2010/11/11/the-nesting-instinct/
Mr. Ebert: I have just finished reading Life Itself and want
to express my admiration for all you have accomplished and are
still accomplishing. I lived overseas 1956-2000, the years you were most active professionally, so all experiences that you relate in the book are of even greater interest to me. I am almost 20 years your senior, but my remembrances of customs and places in my own childhood in Urbana and Champaign, from 1927 to 1946 (CHS 1942) and in the university (LAS BA 1946) (my beloved father was a professor in sociology) are revisited in your pages. Thank you.
I've tried to look at life as if it were a book. The chapters of life are full of special memories. Some chapters are great, some I want to forget. When I come to the end... I just hope it's a great read.
You've been part of a great read.
Thank you Roger,
Richard
Each of your blogs are more personal and therefore more powerful, more meaningful to me. Once, you answered my email praising one of your assessments of a movie in which I said that you really get it: what movies are about. And now, more and more, you really get it, and say it: what life is about. Many blessings to you, Roger.
And you made it a little less boring like the other interesting people I have been acquainted with, Roger - Happy New Year.
Please don't let aging and losing old friends make you think you can't meet new and younger ones, Roger. Several of the most profound moments of friendship or camaraderie in my life have been with people decades different in age than my own. Since losing your voice and writing this journal you have affected many around the world, and while text correspondence can never replace the intimacy of face to face verbal dialogue, for many the computer screen is the only link they have, and a small acknowledgement from you means a lot.
You will always attract kindred spirits, through the twin beacons of intellect and compassion that shine throughout your writing.
Happy New Year.
Roger,
Reading this here in Greece on New Years day reinforces the feelings i have had over the last few years over friends who have slowly been dropping by the wayside.
Well as this has been disturbing to me I cannot forget the ones who have gone far too early. In particular Chuck M's wife at the U of I believe in 1965 (sorry memory about dates gets a little foggy at times). The service if memory serves me right was at the Unitarian church where Dylan Thomas's "Rage" was read.
Over the Labor day weekend of 1965 I went with three couples, one of which was Chuck and his wife to the Indiana dunes for an over night and hamburgers cooked over an open fire. Sand was inadvertently kicked onto the fire and the burgers, I at least acted as if it was grainy salt.
Also, Mike Z who was one of those U of I beatnik/hippies who died in 1970.
So while there is a great deal of emptiness as my older friends pass on, I really feel the "Rage" when I wonder what life would have been for those who went way too early.
With empathy/sympathy and the best for the rest of our lives.
Mike
Okay, Rog, back on the couch: What IS it lately?
First, digging up Contact after fourteen years for another cosmic athie-defense scrap, and now begging for sympathy that What's The Point, We're All Worm-Food Anyway?
Just spill it, Hamlet, WHAT happened in our private life to knock us off the top ten lists and back into the handwringing Sympathy-For-The-Pretentious territory again? More bad news from the doctor, the show being canceled, what??
It was deep discussion fodder the first hundred times, and now it's starting to become like the guy who hangs around saying "Never catch ME doing that" while he spends ten minutes watching you do it.
You wonder why you're the only person in your immediate sphere who likes being important through pessimism, wished you had more people in the clubhouse to be gloomy with and think if you do it hard and often enough, it'll seem more deserving than the rest of us mere happy deluded mortals. News flash, it ain't. Quite the reverse, in fact.
Ebert: It's real simple.I was saddened by those two pieces of news.
Wow. Just wow. Mr. Ebert, please accept my condolences for your loss. I am truly so sorry.
Last night, I attended a small get-together in honor of a friend of mine whose birthday just happens to fall on New Year's Eve. It was surprising to me to come home and read your latest blog post here, as it echoes so much of what friendship, aging and loss are about. I really can't say it any more eloquently than you did.
Just know that it really hit home, and made me see things with so much perspective. It is indeed easy to take some things for granted, and not understand at the time just how special and singular some times, and people, really are. Thanks for the reminder.
"One purpose of an education is to create an interest in the people who were former passengers." - Roger Ebert
I like that.
I'm not sure if you were referring specifically to education in the scholastic and career sense, but that's what I thought of.
I'm returning to school and I'm 30 years old. I've given up IT, been in it for over 10 years now. I just felt no purpose there. Didn't feel a strong connection with those around me nor did I feel very "proud" of my work at the end of the day. So I decided to return for Environmental Science. A study that will take me abroad to be sure, but to respect those in the field already and to seek them out, be interested in them, to find these other passengers is of utmost importance to me now.
I need to create a new circle and group of people I can learn from or to be inspired by. Perhaps some of my Professors will end up being notable passengers for me?
I hope so. There's such a strong sense of apprehension by "restarting" my life and career and education that it's palpable but it isn't misunderstood. I think it's reasonable and it's only human. The challenge is what will drive me.
Eh, easy for me to go on a tangent, but I liked what you wrote here. It's not easy for me to imagine that day when I'll get the inevitable phone call about my Father or my Mother. Or someone else close to me. If I don't seek out more people aboard this ship to share a life with, it will be a very lonely journey.
Thanks for your words.
-Jesse
"To the degree it is possible, I've tried to live my as an undergraduate still rummaging around in the world..."
Roger,
This is (as we used to say) right on. I hope that your disembarkation won't come until many more happy years have gone by.
"Never. never, never, never, never!"
Never ???
I am so sorry for these very personal losses, Roger. I can hear your heart breaking and imagine tears where there are none. Your sharing this tribute to your dear friends is but the latest of your many gifts to us.
Not sure what to make of this latest article Roger. I think it is balancing on positives and negatives but not equally. It's leaning a bit more on the sadness of youth gone and that maybe life isn't so great as we get older. You of course have some serious health problems so I don't blame you. On the positive side you still work reviewing movies on line and have worked on a new show in the last year. In my mind it seems you still enjoy life in a pretty good measure because if you weren't you wouldn't still be working hard at something you still enjoy. Yeah later life can bring a lot of loss but I still think as long as we look ahead there are still a few nuggets of gold to be found in work, family and friends before we leave.
It is good to vent.
"Thinking, asking, discovering" and laughing and loving and holding each other -- I don't know a better description of why we are here.
I am sorry for the loss of your friends. They are not supposed to do that. The most comforting thought in the world is that a dear friend will be there when you reach out again. Too many deaths, we are so mutable.
Went to a funeral home Thursday - someone I used to babysit when we were all much younger. Not close as adults, but still a connection to the family.
You lost your father so early. I have gotten mine back after an absence of decades. His third wife has helped knit the family back together. We have already told them that she won't get rid of us when he is gone. He will be 85 this year. My one girlfriend from childhood, friends again after many years apart, knows that I am one of the few people left in her world who knew both her parents when they were young and vibrant. Shared memory is a treasure.
Love your post-almost too hard to allow forcatharsis anymore. I believe it requires a pause of depth we rarely acknowledge in our skip along world.
Why do some people have to post such negative comments? If you find this post so uninteresting, just don't read it!
Anyhoo, thanks for sharing xo
Written as you, among few others, are able. Deeply from the heart --- and you so generously allow us to go along with you. I am often surprised when I start the journey, and end very moved.
I Can hear your voice reading these eloquent words. Your words create unforgettable images. What a gift, we are so fortunate to read and hopefully listen to what you say and teach. It lets us grieve with you somehow even though we've never met. If this isn't the purpose of writing I don't know what is.
I'm so sorry for your loss Roger. I wish you a happy 2012 and thanks for your journal, which is always a treasure for your readers.
Both of my parents are still alive and so are the great majority of my friends. I've reached the midpoint of my life (if I'm lucky!) and only recently met and married the man of my dreams. I find myself valuing these golden days--taking them for granted for a second seems so wrong. I fear death and getting old, I really do. These columns you've been writing this year, Roger, have been so helpful to me. It's like you're leading your readers through a dark cave. You have a flashlight, and you're telling us what's ahead. When it's scary, you tell us. When you see something strange and beautiful, you tell us. Your words comfort us even when the news isn't good. We trust you and believe what you say, and we hope that one day we will be able to lead others with the same grace, honesty, and courage that you've shown us. Until then, please know that your readers cherish you.
Being only 24 years old, I doubt I have anything of value to say about this. When I think about aging, losing friends, and dying, I feel a strange emotion - like I'm trying to understand something beyond my comprehension. I am scared by it.
I might still be too young to even begin to comprehend it, so all I can really do is thank you, Mr. Ebert, for allaying my fears enough that I might fall asleep a bit more easily at night. I have found my own bit of catharsis through your writings.
Holy smokes, Roger. Profoundly moving stuff. After reading you, I don't feel my dream of winning the lottery and going back to college for as long as I learn doesn't seem as crazy as others think : )
Mr Ebert, I feel honored to get to read the words you write. I've never adored your work more than I have this past year after following you on Twitter of all things. It really is unfortunate that we feel more comfortable approaching strangers, neighbors on this plane than we do in our own neighborhoods. But for what it is worth, I feel more a kindred spirit with you than I could any of my neighbors. I thank you for the opportunity.
Oh Roger..my hero. This is life. We all come full circle..first, second....it always sucks. But it happens to us all. You are an inspiration in the way you live and love and grieve and when your time comes, your friends will feel the same way. Is it easier to be the first? I won't know, they all already left me. But it sucks to be last. hang in there buddy. Love is love is love and I for one thank you for being you .....
you seem icky. like somebody who thinks they are smarter than everybody else. you got a LOT to learn.
Love,
grammaw
Ebert: Aww, Grammaw, you're always saying stuff like that. Like when you wouldn't let me eat those worms.
Dear Mr. Ebert,
Thank you for such a beautiful essay. I remember when my father died just before I turned 30. I had survived two bouts with liver cancer -- quite miraculously apparently. I've been cancer free since 1988. The docs said that I had a 1 in 5 million chance of making it. Then Dad died of a stroke, alone in his apartment in Kent. We had just made plans for me to fly over to England to spend Christmas with him.
The feeling I had was one of being a doughboy in WWI, seeing one wave go "over the top" and knowing, feeling the certainty that I would be next. Would it take a year? Ten? Sixty? Being a theist, I can say without irony, "God only knows." and keep on keeping on.
I suppose that's what we all do, just "Keep on Keeping On".
I am sorry to hear that you received this news just as the New Year turned. As you say though, once we've lived through deaths of others, the tears turn to memories, the pain becomes familiar.
You are blessed with having found a fellow traveler along this path. All I can say is to love with all your strength, all your mind, all your heart. For in the end, that is what we leave--the love we engendered in the hearts of others--perhaps even more so than our worldly achievements.
Sincerely yours,
Thanks for sharing your thoughts on this difficult time in your life. I've had three close to me develop life-threatening cancer this year. The disease swiftly claimed one. Another is recovering after successful treatment. The last is currently mired in radiation therapy and chemo. Jim Broadbent's character confides to Harrison Ford in the last Indiana Jones film that we've reached the point where life is taking more than it's giving us. Your post reminds me why that realization is even more painful than it sounds. I mean that as a compliment - again, thank you very much for sharing.
Thank you for sharing and I am sorry for the world's loss at these two that you give an account for. May your coming days be filled with interesting people who challenge and love you.
What do you want to do in environmental science Jesse? A lot of work in environmental consulting is done right here in the U.S. Believe it or not a lot of the work done that doesn't get a lot of press is pretty important. I work in environmental consulting and remediation. Look into working for companies that work in cleaning soils and groundwater. These are some areas that are easily defined and solutions actually exist. There are good paying jobs in the remediation field and you can travel as little or as much as you like. Depending on what you decide to major in(ie environment geologist, hydrologist or civil engineer) you may have to get your hands dirty and travel a heck of a lot. Good luck with whatever you decide to focus on.
What a wonderfully evocative post. I respect the sentiments and observations that you expressed so well, so reflectively.
I have not yet reached the tipping point. I am still in a phase of losing a parent. I don't yet often receive news like you received. I appreciate your look ahead.
One quibble: While I enjoyed the university life, I do not yearn to live as a undergraduate. I find the university a place frozen in immaturity, perpetually catering to 20 year olds.
There is lifelong inquisitiveness outside of the university.
In the blogosphere, for example. You have introduced me to a fascinating community worldwide, through EbertFest and the FFC's. I find friendship there as I do going next door. We have much more opportunity now to enjoy worldwide community.
I found opportunities to be inquisitive in my military life. What a school of life that was! Survive and thrive in that world and you will have learned something indeed, and made lifelong friends.
I find opportunities to be inquisitve and learn in the industrial world. I work for a global Fortune 50 company, and I learn new things about the world and about business and labor each day. Survive and thrive in that world and you will have learned something indeed. And made lifelong friends globally.
My perception only, but I find that the university community knows little and cares even less about the two worlds of the military and industry. It is often hostile, in fact. That's a shame.
Learning is not just from books, or the university. I am grateful to have learned in all of those disparate laboratories. I continue to be inquisitive. So much to learn.
Roger, you may not be able to cry physically but my heart hears your heart mourning nonetheless.
If you're looking for that willow, I'm your man.
I nod: I'm glad Mr. Ebert is holding the flashlight. We aren't checking in with our neighbors much anymore, nor even our family members and I'm glad somebody is paying attention to the roadmap. Here's hoping that I manage to bring something to the party in 2012.
Shine on, Mr. Ebert!
Long time reader but this is the first time I'm writing. I'm sorry for your loss. This entry truly brought tears to my eyes.
While I realize that I am too young to understand what it must feel like to know more people who are dead than living, your observations about the way we live today resonated with me very deeply. Thank you for proving over and over that one can empathize and learn from experiences that one doesn't necessarily identify with.
I hope the year to come has better news to offer. You've made the world a more interesting place.
Very fine stuff. One small spelling error:
"People do not mix and associate as much, join as many cubs, get in the swim."
I'm assuming "cubs" should be "clubs." Then again, maybe your love of baseball was showing?
Best,
Andrew
Eric J's comments are so flippant and lack such empathy, I am concerned for his well-being.
How timely that I just viewed "Midnight in Paris." Owen Wilson's character Gil is riding with Ernest Hemingway, who's retelling a war story:
Gil: Were you scared of getting killed?
Hemingway: You'll never write well if you fear dying? Do you?
(Gil admits that yes, in fact, it's his greatest fear.)
Hemingway: It's something all men before you have done, all men will do....I believe that love that is true and real creates a respite from death. All cowardice comes from not loving or not loving well, which is the same thing. And when the man who is brave and true looks death squarely in the face...it is because he loves with sufficient passion to push death out of his mind. Until it returns, as it does to all men.
In spite of it being smack dab in the middle of a Woody Allen comedy, this scene shook me to the core, suddenly making me shudder with the impact of my own mortality, here on the first day of a brand-new year. I'm lucky that my parents are still alive, at 85 and 77, but I'm unsettled that this sense of security will soon be gone like a wisp of smoke. And so few of us have loved with a love that renders death meaningless, even if only for a few, transitory moments. It puts things in perspective about how I live my life and how I respond to others. Uncomfortably so.
What a moving, provocative essay, Roger. Heartbreaking, yes, but the fact that of late, your voice has became more powerful and compassionate than ever before should give us all hope.
Beautiful piece; I know the following words are often used tritely, but you really have shared something of yourself, which is rare and wonderful. Thank you.
Tiny typo; I know you're from Chicago but I'm pretty sure you meant to say "join as many clubs", not "join as many cubs." Sorry, I'm an editor, can't help myself.
I'm sorry you are experiencing yet another loss of fellow passengers. I watch my parents go through this (in their late 70s) and each death makes their world a little smaller. They have lively minds, but don't associate with people as much as I think they ought to. I think it would enrich their lives, but perhaps they've developed a fear of making new friends -- after all, new friends will just die, too, won't they?
I like your take on boredom -- since retiring early 2 years ago, I have had to tackle boredom. I don't think the next great idea is going to come out of me, but I do strive to keep my world interesting. Otherwise, it would be unbearable here.
Your writing is beautiful and heartfelt. I so appreciate your work. Thanks, and Happy New Year.
Your comment on the walls going up really struck me. It seems like more and more of our lives are being lived online. In 100 years will people have any live social interaction at all?
EricJ, a few things move me to express myself creatively through writing. Chief among them are curiosity (the questions for which I don't have answers), love (but seldom happiness), and death (or loss). I understand that impulse. Maybe you've been moved thus, maybe not. If you have, I urge you to remember.
You may not care what others have to say about you when your time comes, or what thoughts your passing will inspire (you will, after all, be dead). Still, perhaps folks will have nothing to say.
So sorry for your loss. It must be extra painful to feel you can't cry. But this blog, your work in this stage of your life, is intensely cathartic and wise. Titanic.
Thank you, Mr. Ebert. My son sent me the link for this blog. I believe it was my New Year's present from him and from you. And it was a wonderful one.
One of the most helpful historic quotes I've known was by Franklin D. Roosevelt: "There's nothing to fear but fear itself." I believe he stated this after the bombing of Pearl Harbor.
So, your memoir is entitled "Life Itself." I don't think fear and life are precisely the same. However, sometimes we are driven in our lives by fear, in our careers and other life aspects. This slightly wavers from your statement above that human ingenuity is driven by boredom.
I love your memoir's title, as that phraseology is reminiscent of something an omniscient narrator would use in a good movie (for example in Coen's "The Big Lebowski"). As we all move past our live's endpoint, I think the notion of such a narrator for each of our lives is comforting, especially for those of us who've been blissfully enveloped by a movie's charms and powers.
Thank you for your eloquence and honesty.
Mr. Ebert,
Thank you for you poetic and profound words. Your reflective voice is Didionesque in its evocation of grief and moving to those who understand loss.
I enjoy every tweet, every film review, and every blog entry. Thank you. Thank you.
"All over America, the walls are going up. People do not mix and associate as much, join as many clubs, get in the swim. We have the right to privacy, but we no longer feel we have the right to go next door and pay an unannounced call. We get looked at strangely. Why are we there? If you say, "I just thought I'd visit my next door neighbor," you get looked at strangely, even with fear."
In most, if not all human interactions, the facades are up and strong. We are very seldom "ourselves" with others. Why? Because at heart we fear one another; your contemporary is not truly your friend; s/he is a competitor for limited earthly and intellectual resources. Only if somehow you can convince another person that you are not his rival, or even better, if you can convince him that you may be beneficial to him, then a relationship may haltingly occur. If you can establish a symbiosis, better still. How "evolutionary"!
Another obstruction to human interaction is fear of commitment and intimacy. How close are you prepared to be with this person? Must you empathically share every emotion with that other person, including reactions to encroaching human mortality? Must you ultimately bear responsibility for that person's well-being? Many of us have all we can do to manage our own tangled, conflicting thoughts and emotions.
I believe these obstacles become even more onerous and insurmountable as we grow older and organize our cumulative experiences, knowledge, and wisdom. In many cases, that repository is satisfactory enough company, because one can indulge in one's memories unabashedly, without inhibition or limit.
Furthermore, even under the best circumstances, relationships and friendships can be irksome high maintenance. Barring dementia, memories, good or bad, can comfort, fortify, and legitimize one's soul.
In a way, the "panning for gold" metaphor is apt.
Everyone seems to be brainwashed by corporate propaganda, existing mechanically, the mechanism of which is just trying to make everyone else lower their eyebrows, arising from a disbelief about their shadow side, or unconscious, and it sets off a chain that never gets broken creating a society birthed from the despairing belief of one's self and then disassociated to others; we live in a society of disassociation. Is it any wonder that when given the power to disassociate the despair of ourselves to others with the typing of a keyboard that this chain would continue? Is it any wonder that, before that, marketing would use this despair to promote a "competitive" mindset of this disassociation to make to where we disassociate, or "compete" with others as a kind of alpha-status stepping-stone: which is what we are reduced to when we run away from ourselves; because if life exists on the plane of scapegoating others of out disbelief of ourselves, then life becomes a competition about who can scapegoat the other the best: which itself, really, is just man reduced to an animal where whoever growls the best is the leader (may the best scapegoater be the leader and hold sway).
I don't tell people what to do. Saying things like "Happy birthday" or Happy new year"...or telling them how to choose friends....etc. is telling somebody else what to do: which really, makes it into a conversation with a child now which would make someone lower their eyebrows from either perplexity (remember it's about you looking evil to THEM; lowering eyebrows tend to look evil..even if just done out of curiosity), or from offense and then thus, conveniently, look like a devil to scapegoat from which to run away...or the unconscious part of ourselves: which is sort of understandable, as it is by definition unconscious...but post-Freud and Jung etc, we ought to know better. But anyway, this creates a world where everyone is confused and frightened because the role they are supposed to be playing is other person's devil or scapegoats etc. (designated by the lowering of eyebrows): and being confused and frightened from disbelieving of the unconscious of one's self is where it all started in the first place: which is the situation the corporate propaganda would like it to be; "Hey, while everyone is scapegoating the other, why don't you scapegoat them by buying what I'm selling you as a kind of rebuke to them?"
Thanks Shaggy,
I'm open to what comes my way as I'm just beginning my studies now. I hope to have a more focused direction within the next couple years of studying my undergrad.
If all goes well I may even stay in school to get my Graduates in the field.
I'm sure you understand when I say that just about anything that I can be making a legitimate difference and actively doing purposeful work will excite me and interest me greatly. I expect to find that there will be plenty of opportunities for that!
Doing work in the US would be fine but I'd honestly love to travel in my work too. Working in smaller countries and places that need the help too. It'd be a fine experience I think.
I'd love to keep in touch with others in the field so please stop by my blog (linked on my name) and shoot me an e-mail!
Regards,
-Jesse Linden
Dear Paul,
I was going to say exactly the same thing you did. I am currently learning to live with a degenerative condition, and have become more and more aware of how important the life and energy of the young are. I still have much to learn and enjoy from them, and they keep me alive and feeling like life is worth living.
So to Roger: Do know that there are many young people out there would are well worth the energy to get to know them WELL. They have new views, new perspectives, new loves, and can expand your universe rather than shrink it.
Yes, the loves we lose are important and no less so for their loss, but we much live in the presence and enjoy what is left.
thank you for being an inspiration to us!!
Avis
I'm sorry for the loss of you friends Roger. Two of my cousins just lost their father four days and though they tried to keep positive by remembering the good times having the family around was pretty therapeutic. I have a question for you though. You mentioned in your article about thinking should you be packing your bags for debarkation. Have you given up on living or is it just an acceptance of something else? I know your health is not great because of your past surgeries but i thought you were on the whole feeling pretty good and weren't in any danger presently. I only hope its rumination and reflection because of what's happened. I hope your work will keep you positive and keep you wanting to go on for a long time. You're only 69 after all that's pretty young in today's standards.
Mr. Ebert,
Thank you.
Through your inspiration we will all grow.
You always seem to share true wisdom.
Roger:
What a beautiful post. I'd like your permission to link to/write about it on my blog this week.
You and I had a wonderful, mutual friend: Delle Chatman. Before she died, she encouraged my idea to write a book about people's experiences grieving their friends. If you'd like to talk about any of your friends for the book, I'd be honored to include you.
That comment seemed like a good idea last night. I don't know anymore. I'd appreciate it if you didn't publish it.
Thanks,
Luke
It's easier to disembark this vessel seeing and learning all the things you've witnessed than living life so passively as most people have.
Eric J's comments are so flippant and lack such empathy, I am concerned for his well-being.
Don't be--It was late at night, sorry, and after the Contact column, I'd had just a little too much of what on a quick read seemed like another Ebert misery-begs-company "Aren't there any other atheists out there who wanna play?"
While that may not have been the SOLE motivation for the post--I can understand a loss, having lost my own mother five years ago--it does emphasize the point some of the readers have made every time some personal problem comes up and he does go on a solitary athie-recruitment jag: To those of us with a little faith, death just isn't that big a deal. We miss the people who've moved on--as we've moved on, figuratively--but there is still a life to be lived, for the benefit of others as well as ourselves, and "O, Captain, my captain" becomes more of a rebellious cry for individuality from a corny Robin Williams movie.
And to be honest, it wasn't the column that finally camel's-straw set me off late at night, it was the "Artsy postcards of graveyards" illustrations to set the tone...And they called ME "flippant".
Because you think you're "smarter" than the answers you want to find, Roger, you keep looking for them, wonder why people occasionally register annoyance, thrill at being "cast out" from the idiots around you, and then turn it all back into ego and say, well, it's your own curse to be the wandering Diogenes. Here's an idea: Have you ever tried NOT looking for the Ultimate Answer, and tried living it instead? You may have given up the bottle for real, but have you ever tried not drowning your physical and retirement sorrows in the bottle of Weary Cynicism? There is nothing noble or insightful about reading the obituaries and looking for old friends; a million senior citizens do it every day, and saying "That's what happens when you get old" is no defense or all-covering excuse.
You ask us to be "curious" in seeking out what we should be doing with the time we have left, and then write a column providing a full-color illustration of what happens when we don't. It comes off a bit like the parent who says "Don't make the mistakes I made", but there's still time not to make your own and show off how beyond reach you think you are.
Ebert: It hadn't occurred to me that anyone would find the entry cynical. It was an on-the-spot reaction; I received those two pieces of news, and started to write.
BTW, that's not an artsy postcard of a graveyard. It's the "Fountain of Time" by the sculptor Lorado Taft, on the Midway Plaisance of the University of Chicago:
http://bit.ly/sDrLoA
I can see how my entry might strike some the way it did you. I enjoy your comments.
Roger, seems like the perfect day for you to have written this! Right before I found this I recived news that my father in law is passing today. Sorry to say that this news is not abad thing for me, no love loss there. But it stopped me made me think, I thought of all my friends that are gone, how uneven things are now, I too am stuck at home relying on the computer to get out and mingle. How I miss picking up the phone and hearing that 'voice' on the other line of special someone who has been gone from my life. I know the day will come soon when I wil see them all again! That doesnt mean that I can't miss them today. Everyday that i wake up I just think of it as another round of stories to tell them when I do get up there! I went to 8 funerals in the period of a 3 week span... Death is like birth... A new chapter
Mr. Ebert, we have never met, are never likely to meet and, at this stage, it wouldn't matter if we did. But if you leave this world before I do, I will be lost. This blog, all that you've done and especially "Life Itself" are among the great and wonderful treasures of my life. You've opened my eyes in ways that no one else has.
I'm sorry, Roger. It's so hard to lose a friend.
It says something special about your writing that all your commenters use periods and capitals. Thanks for molding this community.
Ebert: And words in between! You don't see that on a lot of blogs.
Dear Roger, the hurt always reveals the pricelessness. It is terrible that you are hurting, yet it is wonderful that you've known such pricelessness. Thank you for sharing it.
I just saw three of the movies you recommended--Sherlock Holmes, MI4, and War Horse. War Horse definitely made me feel better about life. I'm so glad Spielberg isn't afraid to portray the feeling of pity. (By the way, I think this is the feeling that is ticking off Eric J. the most).
This piece is about loss, friendship, and mortality. It has nothing to do with any brand of belief, other than the cold hard reality that, regardless of what we believe, we still end up dead in the end, and in our journey to that point, "a relentless narrowing takes place."
"""The movie deals with death in a way that might be unfamiliar to people who know nothing of war except what they learned in war movies. I believe that fear doesn't delay death, and so it is fruitless. A guy is hit. So, he's hit. That's that. I don't cry because that guy over there got hit. I cry because I'm gonna get hit next.""
- Sam Fuller, director of "The Big Red One", appearing in Roger Ebert's review of the same name.
So it is with life. When we hear of a close associate's death and/or attend their funeral, we ultimately don't cry for that person. We cry for ourselves, because we will eventually be hit next. We all fear death, even when we don't.
EricJ, at the risk of incurring blog posters' repugnance, I actually enjoyed your comments. Perhaps Mr. Ebert is using various blogs as therapy, to reconcile himself with his mortality, as we all must with our various strategems. If the blogs ARE therapy, you just can't beat the session fees!
Hmmm. I posted a comment a few days ago, but it hasn't shown up. That's OK: It gives me a chance to turn to my betters. Here's Socrates on death:
"You are my friends, and I should like to show you the meaning of [my imminent death]. … Death [is] either a … state of nothingness and utter unconsciousness, or, as men say, there is a change and migration of the soul from this world to another. Now if you suppose that there is no consciousness, but a sleep like the sleep of him who is undisturbed even by dreams, death will be an unspeakable gain. For if a person were to select the night in which his sleep was undisturbed even by dreams, and were to compare with this the other days and nights of his life, … I think that any man … will not find many such days or nights, when compared with the others. Now if death be of such a nature, I say that to die is gain; for eternity is then only a single night. But if death is the journey to another place, and there, as men say, all the dead abide, … how blessed to … converse with Homer and Hesiod; to see the heroes of Troy, and to continue the search after knowledge in another world! … If indeed when the pilgrim arrives in the world below, he is delivered from the professors of justice in this world, and finds the true judges who are said to give no judgment there, Minos and Rhadamanthus and Aeacus and Triptolemus, and other sons of God who were righteous in their own life, that pilgrimage will be worth making. What would not a man give if he might converse with Orpheus and Musaeus and Hesiod and Homer? Nay, if this be true, let me die again and again. I myself, too, shall have a wonderful interest in there meeting and conversing with Palamedes, and Ajax the son of Telamon, and any other ancient hero who has suffered death through an unjust judgment; and there will be small pleasure, as I think, in comparing my own sufferings with theirs. Above all, I shall then be able to continue my search into true and false knowledge; as in this world, so also in the next; and I shall find out who is wise, and who pretends to be wise, and is not."
Someday (not today, of course) I could go for a nice long nap--or the ultimate Constant Viewing, elbow to elbow with Welles and Kael and Ford and Hitchcock and Siskel and Clarens and Agee and my parents and Truffaut and Ozu and everyone else who will beat me to the best seats in the House. Ready when you are, C.B.
I meant to say "displacement" not disassociation in my last comment (which was also wrong for "dissociation"...but maybe there's some of that), which was a an offshoot of the first part (about shadow side), basically meaning that we live in a rude society as part of a chain started from someone who is very despairing about their own thoughts and all of these chains appear to be normal because all we see is all the links in the chain except the most important one: the first one.
I saw "The Artist" yesterday and there's a part in the movie that isn't so much about friendship as it was about true values and having a soul. That was the scene with Clifton (you know the one...that one that made everyone cry...including me a little). And it's something I'd been feeling like for a long time...am I the only person left on this planet that has values and places having a soul above all else (edit: I changed this on following sentences)? It was refreshing to see that there was a movie out there that finally touched upon this. I needed to see that that was still out there. Spoiler alert:...I felt it would have been completely understandable for Clifton to go become a bum with his values...but I forgot...that's the world we live in now...not the world of that movie! And it's not so much that we live by those values either...just that we know what they are. If you do something is wrong and you know it's wrong...then it's not wrong anymore. If you do something wrong and tell yourself it's not wrong, then it's wrong. We live in a society where we tell ourselves it's not wrong. Also the scene where he tips the guy...he just got screwed but then he tips him. Hey, there's more important things than this. I would have done the same thing. That tip was about saying "this means something more than just this." And it wasn't the guy who was screwing him, but the path he was taking himself. It's about time we get a movie that tells us there's more important things out there because really all we need is to know that. (edit: yes there are movies that might pay lip service to this....but doesn't seem true....off the top of my head, there's a good line in the movie "Blow" where Ray Liotta says "money doesn't matter; it only seems like it does"....yeah, true, but that seemed to be more about not living in the future by constantly making plans than values...which wasn't really what the movie was about either).
Word change...about "The Artist" I meant to say that it was a relief (not refreshing...although there's that too) to see that there was a movie that told us there's more important things out there; I have tip-of-the-tongue problems.
I should have left my comment where I said it was a movie with people with values etc. as I originally intended to...but I think I'm just a little needing to settle a score with someone and I'm maybe kind of under the spell of this slight and because of that, also their dreamworld (the kind of brainwashing I was talking about earlier)...and I need to tell them off before I can get back to normal (which hopefully is soon) and can't let them get away with it....because now I'm trapped in this dream world. I just hate people (and get tired) of telling people the stuff about brainwashing and stuff to their face. But looks like I've got to tell another person to their face all this stuff that I say here again.
Ebert: Keith, your comments are unique in that you copyread and improve them online.
The comments by Paul Marasa which followed your entry were superb.
Is it coincidence that the last three blogs you have written are about endings, of sorts?
I don't believe there is an afterlife, but I do believe we live on through others. My grandfather died in 1993. He sacrificed for me and my brothers all his life. He had only an eighth grade education, wasn't articulate, worked as a janitor for the school corporation for which I know teach.
I don't believe he can hear me when I speak to him, though he lives through me when I go to work or care for my little boy. I miss him on a daily basis and would give the last year of my life, gladly, to just have three minutes to thank him.
I'll bet most of us have someone like that in our lives, don't we?
Beautifully written. Sorry for your loss.
Beautifully written, thanks
I'm so glad you're writing these amazing, personal pieces.
Thank you so much.
Thank you again. Your articles not only made our lives more interesting but made us all a little more compassionate. I dread the day you disembark.
Mr. Ebert, it may be a little early in the season, but maybe you can start some sunflower seeds indoors, they are fun to watch sprout and grow. Don't grow the mammoth ones, as they get too spindly, and if you transplant them outside, they need to be staked. And arou d here I have to fence them in with netting around a tomato plant hoop, as the ones that aren't get eaten by rabbits. But if you can grow some it may cheer you up, as even if you won't see them get a full head of seeds in the fall, they make pretty flowers for most of the summer. And if you don't have time for all that. You can grow some lettuce or raddishes, they grow faster. I know you wint be able to eat those, but maybe someone you know would like them. Here's to a short winter and an early Spring. Keep buying green bananas, you never know.
Maybe slightly off topic.
I learn about people who embark on journeys to complete their bucket lists and people who seem to be having the time of their lives over the years and I wonder if they ever get tired of always trying to fill themselves. When they're done with that, they say it was fun and then ask what's next? I think it's called "self-actualization"?
I kinda agree with Wallace in "My Dinner with Andre." What's really the difference between going to a cigar store and climbing Mt. Everest?
Some people may be "disgusted" with the whole go to school - get a job - get married - have kids - get them to school - retire routine. But I think it's really more about the adventure.
Off Topic to Mr. Ebert:
Its good to vent personal displeasure with your blatant misuse of the greengrocers' apostrophe. In a related question, why does the plural of tomato need an 'e' and potato doesnt'?
You, sir, are immortalized. We all are. In HTML code, in pictures, in memories, in stories. In legacy, in thrusts, in frame and in stone and in lists.
We will forget you, though not entirely. We would remember you, but only sometimes.
But we will know you. Sadly, that is not enough. It is never enough. I am sorry never to have met you, in person; my mom pays for my air tickets. I thank CERN for the internet, and I thank ASUS for my laptop, and all related affiliates, et al.
Don't go, Mr. Ebert, don't go.
O Captain, my Captain, we are all done for. 2012 is sure to be the Year of the Beast. TWINKIES just bankrupted.
Here's a brief "thank you" post I wrote on (I think) New Year's Day, but it never went through. Maybe you thought it was off-topic, or maybe the spam filter ate it, but I figured I'd go ahead and try to post it again.
I'd like to reiterate how much your post meant to me, and how eerily perfect the timing was.
------------------------
Your essay came at just the right time. My future father-in-law died of a sudden heart attack on Thursday, less than two months before the wedding. A drop to the ground, and that was it.
His death came at a time I felt closer than ever to my new family. We were visiting them for Christmas. A man of few words, he had started to open up to me more than ever. It's almost eerie to think about how lovely our last dinner was together. The entire family was at a nice restaurant. I had the privilege of sitting near him, just by chance, or luck, or fate. We drank beer together. He wasn't the sentimental type, but he told me the first time ever that I was a good guy. I think he was also trying to say that he was confident I'd be taking good care of his daughter.
I said goodnight to him that evening. He extended his hand for a shake, but I hugged him anyway.
The family I'll be joining is still a family, but it's different now. The wedding will be different, too. I can't help but feel cheated. I always assumed he would be a passenger on the ship for another couple of decades. Or for at least one. Certainly, for the wedding. He was 64.
Ebert: Oh, my. At least you had that time together.
I post virtually everything that isn't offensive. The spam filter sometimes acts up. I get so much spam it isn't practical to search in there.
Twissel Dunn said:
... why does the plural of tomato need an 'e' and potato doesnt'?
My research shows this to be a device crafted to determine if Vice Presidents were paying attention during grade school.
"I am the greatest; I said that even before I knew I was."
Ali turns 70.
Contradictorily, I recognize my fulfillment whilst reading your prose, sadly made possible through your loss and reflection.
Discovery of an inability to cry must feel peculiar. I read in your review of Amistad that The Color Purple moved you to tears. Might you identify other films that also caused you to well up in the past?
Your Ali piece from 1979 was extra special. Thanks for sharing.
I'll be darned. This one didn't show up in my 'puter 'til just this morning.
Anyway: http://bit.ly/x9p5xh
There're better versions but this is the only one that didn't screw around forever just to get to the first verse.
Now don't tell me there's nobody, nay, nobody whom you'd like to spend a few years on the planet without.
(sung:) No, neverrrrrrrr?
I’ve been meaning to share a story with you.
As a kid growing up in southern Missouri, my dad was a small-time drug dealer. (Let me just tell you how accurate “Winter’s Bone” really is!) He wasn’t a great father, but he was a huge movie fan and exposed me to a lot of good films. At an early age—too early, no doubt—I was watching “Raging Bull” and “Apocalypse Now.”
He also introduced me to your show with Gene Siskel, and we watched every week. We were especially fond of the “Dog of the Week” segment.
Two of his clients were roommates who lived in Springfield. One was tall and skinny, and the other was a little less so. They looked so much like you and Gene. I always called them “Siskel and Ebert” and was excited when we’d get to go to Springfield to make a delivery. Here’s the thing—looking back, I really thought they were you and Siskel! I was young, five or six at most, and so that transition from TV to reality was a little more difficult.
This is beautiful. Thank you.