... and it was also only in that era as well with the invention of the gramophone that it became possible for anyoneās voice at all, no matter how eminent, to be recorded and heard after their death. The earlier privilege of remaining uncaptured, of dying with oneās death, was lost. Should the dead move around us like those who havenāt died? Should their presence be more material than those one sees in dreams?
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She couldnāt, but she said something that changed my life. "Watch her carefully right now," she said, "because sheās teaching you how to live."
I remind myself of this when I cannot get any work done: to live as if I am dying, because the truth is we are all terminal on this bus. To live as if we are dying gives us a chance to experience some real presence. Time is so full for people who are dying in a conscious way, full in the way that life is for children. They spend big round hours. So instead of staring miserably at the computer screen trying to will my way into having a breakthrough, I say to myself, "Okay, hmmm, letās see. Dying tomorrow. What should I do today?" Then I can decide to read Wallace Stevens for the rest of the morning or go to the beach or just really participate in ordinary life. Any of these will begin the process of filling me back up with observations, flavors, ideas, visions, memories. I might want to write on my last day on earth, but Iād also be aware of other options that would feel at least as pressing. I would want to keep whatever I did simple, I think. And I would want to be present.
You must struggle to truly remember this past in all its nuance, error, and humanity. You must resist the common urge toward the comforting narrative of divine law, toward fairy tales that imply some irrepressible justice. The enslaved were not bricks in your road, and their lives were not chapters in your redemptive history. They were people turned to fuel for the American machine. Enslavement was not destined to end, and it is wrong to claim our present circumstance - no matter how improved - as the redemption for the lives of people who never asked for the posthumous, untouchable glory of dying for their children.
Word got out and what people said was that Dad had been a person of such saintly character that his body had to remain uncorrupted. I was just a kid when he died and nearly my whole life Iāve been hearing everyone say what a good person he was. But to see him emerge that day shifted my thinking. It was as if his early death had been a metaphysical error. It was as if his body was refusing the fate that befell him, as if this whole time he had been awaiting a fairer judgment.
Slavery is so abhorrent that, before getting to grips with the historical scholarship on the topic, I assumed that abolition must have been inevitable. But now Iām not at all sure. Though itās impossible to know for certain, itās entirely plausible to me that, were the tape of history rerun a hundred times with slightly different starting conditions, in a significant proportion of those reruns, there would still be legal slavery in many or most countries in the world, even at todayās level of technological development.
That changes when you leave with a story thatās good enough to put you back in the moment, as if you were living it all over again. Thatās why we took the Legends so seriously. If people were coming to us to add to their collection of experiences, then we saw these not as extra flourishes but as a responsibility: to give people a memory so good it enabled them to relive their experience with us.
The true gift, then, wasnāt the street hot dog or the bag full of candy bars; it was the story that made a Legend a legend.