(An Anti-Tirade)
What will it be like? A slightly colder place, albeit only infinitesimally. There will be others who come along; but no one with exactly my sort of humor to entertain them and offer them insight. No one with a certain love and generosity that helped sustain some. No one with the exact same grasping selfishness that few seemed to recognize but that in any case helped to drive me. There would be a small loss of liveliness, as though the laughter and excitement in the cafés that delighted me were dimmed a tiny notch and the chairs were empty a few minutes earlier. A few people would be sad.
Maybe too the world will be slightly calmer, less frantic, its schedules less packed with stuff, with things I wanted to do or learn, papers I intended to read over but mostly never got to.
But to speak truly, I think the world will be very largely the same. Wouldn’t it be arrogant and “grandiose,” as Barbara1 might say, to expect otherwise? Continue reading