Passing Greatness

This is a month - a week ! - when we're losing some of our great public characters, people who shaped our times:

A funerary wreath - public domain from the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Today I read of the death of choreographer Paul Taylor - hugely influential in dance.  

Also recent is the death of playwright Paul Simon at 91, who pretty much owned Broadway in the 1960s and '70s.  I fully expect that a version of his The Odd Couple will someday be performed on Mars.  (Question: Felix or Oscar who's the martian versus the astronaut/colonist?  I imagine a neat-freak astronaut always worrying about habitat pollution and atmosphere breaches...)  The lights on Broadway dimmed last night in his honor.

Aretha Franklin, Queen of Soul, was buried this week with appropriate pomp and ceremony.

And Senator John McCain.


Let's look back fondly and with respect.

During sad periods like this it feels as if losses pile up and comfort is thin against the chill of time passing, of entropy, of the void.  Nothing and no one lasts.  "It's all sand-painting," as one wise actor told me, as we watched my set (built with so much labor!) being thrown away.  In theater you see that ephemeral quality more starkly than, perhaps, in other kinds of lives.  Things pass.  Even the pyramids aren't what they once were.

But things come to pass too.  Wonderful new characters arrive daily... we just don't find out for a while.  I wish it were possible to read - right next to an obituary - a birth notice (a genitary?) announcing the arrival of the next truly great dancer or playwright or singer or statesman - explaining just how important and beloved they will become.  Not in replacement of those greats we lose, but as something new and differently excellent, perhaps in a field or kind of life that doesn't yet exist...  Maybe these inspiring figures are already here, almost ready to take the stage and make it their own.  

Let's look around us...  hopefully.