While starting to write this first blog, I realized that if current trends hold, these blogs will inevitably include reports on the deaths of people who matter to me, our community, and/or the world. So to counterbalance the eulogies to come – and in a spirit of optimism and fresh beginnings, as we launch this website – I’ll start with some excellent news: somewhere, one of the world’s greatest geniuses has recently been born.
Yes, somebody who will make an enormous difference to us all is pooping in a nappy at this very moment. Sorry, can’t tell you who it is, or where – or their gender, culture, ethnicity or socioeconomic background. I don’t know the nature of their great deeds to come. I just know that there is a great savior out there whose chief concern at the moment is to get as much milk as possible out of the nipple in its mouth.
Mark Twain put this, as he put so many things, better than I: “Among the three or four million cradles now rocking in the land are some which this nation would preserve for ages as sacred things, if we could know which ones they are.” As he spoke, at a banquet in Chicago in November, 1879, some of the cradles rocking in his land contained the diapered little forms of actor Ethel Barrymore, labour leader Joe Hill, comedian Will Rogers, birth-control advocate Margaret Sanger, poet Wallace Stevens, Dr. Bob Smith, founder of Alcoholics Anonymous – and Nancy Langhorne, who, as naturalized Englishwoman Nancy Astor, became the first female MP in the British House of Commons. (She was also a notorious anti-Semite and Nazi sympathizer. Not all the valuable cradles contained nice people.)
In other lands slept months-old infants Thomas Beecham, Wanda Landowska, Ottorino Respighi – good year for musicians, 1879! – Edward Steichen, Leon Trotsky and Emiliano Zapata – and in Germany, watched over by his loving parents Hermann and Pauline Einstein, there slumbered a little squirt they had named Albert.
In our own land, probably the most preservation-worthy cradles contained (this seems so Canadian) novelist and early Canuck playwright (yay) Mazo de la Roche, and Cluny Macpherson, inventor of the gas mask (also yay).
The great person presently sleeping in a 2023 cradle might become world-renowned, or might spend their life in obscurity despite their noble deeds. They could be one of the Lamed Vav. “Lamed vav” (law-mid vawv) is Hebrew for “36,” and refers to a delightful Jewish tradition that at any moment there are 36 individual people on the planet who are so righteous that their existence prevents God from blowing the whole thing up in frustration with the rest of us.
In some traditions, the Lamed Vav are all Jews, and in some, they need not be; in any case, they need not be famous: both conditions are statistically unlikely. They might never become as renowned as Albert Einstein, Leon Trotsky or Cluny Macpherson. We’ll never know who they are, and their virtue may not be evident to the rest of us. The guy who cut you off in traffic or the young barista who was rude to you might be one of the Lamed Vav, so treat them accordingly. Also (I love this), they don’t know who they are – the only hint is that if you think you’re one of them, you’re not – so you might be one, so for God’s sake don’t screw this up!
When I was a boy, attending my first funeral, it occurred to me that when a baby is born, everybody’s happy about its future possibilities, but of course we don’t know what those are. But when an old person dies, we know what they’ve done, what they were like, and how we feel about them. Therefore we can never be as happy at the birth of a new baby as we are sad at the death of a familiar loved one. Therefore, life is essentially tragic. I was a sensitive lad.
I now disagree with my younger self. Of course it always remains true that we mourn the loss of our loved ones. But I’ve changed my mind regarding how to feel about the potentiality inherent in a squalling little human fried tomato in a hospital or a slum or a mansion or an igloo or a farm or a refugee camp somewhere. That potentiality is infinite.