I answer Norman Geras’s fun questions here.
ON TILLMAN: An obituary of sorts – from yours truly. Or at least a way of stopping for a second to acknowledge a real man.
EMAIL OF THE DAY: “Thanks for that piece on Pat Tillman, I was hoping you would write something. I keep thinking about how he used to climb up that light tower at Sun Devil Stadium just to be by himself and think. I imagine he was assessing his life and figuring out what was the most worthy way to spend it. So much value is placed on living a long life, it is easy to lose sight of the underlying assumption that the reason we hope to live long is so we have more time to live worthily. What it means to live worthily is sometimes hard to tell. People have lots of opinions about what you are supposed to be doing with your life, but when the end of the line comes, you’re the one who has to lie there alone on your deathbed and reflect upon the choices you made when all is said and done. If only that reflection were done earlier in life instead of later. I think Tillman was one of the few who had that question sized up long time ago.
There is this really great short story in The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury called “Kaleidoscope.” A rocket ship carrying a dozen or so astronauts explodes, scattering the crew members into outer space. They are flying apart at thousands of miles an hour in their spacesuits, fully conscious and able to communicate with one another, but individually they are alone and being hurled to their own deaths. As one man named Hollis careens toward the earth’s atmosphere he listens to other people’s final reflections, both happy and embittered, and he realizes he has never really lived but always played it safe, always envied people who had the guts to enjoy life and take chances, and he realizes for the first time that he has nursed a secret resentment against them. Yet nothing–not resentment nor cowardice nor regret–could do anything for him now:
“It was gone. When life is over it is like a flicker of bright film, an instant on the screen, all of its prejudices and passions condensed and illumined for an instant on space, and before you could cry out, ‘There was a happy day, there a bad one, there an evil face, there a good one,’ the film burned to a cinder, the screen went dark. From this outer edge of his life, looking back, there was only one remorse, and that was only that he wished to go on living. Did all dying people feel this way, as if they had never lived? Did life seem that short, indeed, over and done before you took a breath? Did it seem this abrupt and impossible to everyone, or only to himself, here, now, with a few hours left to him for thought and deliberation?”
So in Hollis’ final desperate moments he realizes that there isn’t anything good he can do to make up for the lost years because now he is all alone. The realization has come too late and there is no one around that he can do good to. But then he thinks: “Tomorrow night I’ll hit Earth’s atmosphere. I’ll burn and be scattered in ashes all over the continental lands. I’ll be put to use. Just a little bit, but ashes are ashes and they’ll add to the land.” This gives him some comfort. Then he thinks: “I wonder if anyone will see me?”
Meanwhile on earth: “The small boy on the country road looked up and screamed. ‘Look, Mom, look, a falling star!’ The blazing white star fell down the sky of dusk in Illinois. ‘Make a wish,’ said his mother. ‘Make a wish . . .'”
The Dish 