“Most of my predecessors in this place have commended him who made this speech part of the law, telling us that it is well that it should be delivered at the burial of those who fall in battle. For myself, I should have thought that the worth which had displayed itself in deeds would be sufficiently rewarded by honours also shown by deeds; such as you now see in this funeral prepared at the people’s cost. And I could have wished that the reputations of many brave men were not to be imperilled in the mouth of a single individual, to stand or fall according as he spoke well or ill. For it is hard to speak properly upon a subject where it is even difficult to convince your hearers that you are speaking the truth. On the one hand, the friend who is familiar with every fact of the story may think that some point has not been set forth with that fullness which he wishes and knows it to deserve; on the other, he who is a stranger to the matter may be led by envy to suspect exaggeration if he hears anything above his own nature. For men can endure to hear others praised only so long as they can severally persuade themselves of their own ability to equal the actions recounted: when this point is passed, envy comes in and with it incredulity. However, since our ancestors have stamped this custom with their approval, it becomes my duty to obey the law and to try to satisfy your several wishes and opinions as best I may.

“I shall begin with our ancestors: it is both just and proper that they should have the honour of the first mention on an occasion like the present. They dwelt in the country without break in the succession from generation to generation, and handed it down free to the present time by their valour. And if our more remote ancestors deserve praise, much more do our own fathers, who added to their inheritance the empire which we now possess, and spared no pains to be able to leave their acquisitions to us of the present generation. Lastly, there are few parts of our dominions that have not been augmented by those of us here, who are still more or less in the vigour of life; while the mother country has been furnished by us with everything that can enable her to depend on her own resources whether for war or for peace. That part of our history which tells of the military achievements which gave us our several possessions, or of the ready valour with which either we or our fathers stemmed the tide of Hellenic or foreign aggression, is a theme too familiar to my hearers for me to dilate on, and I shall therefore pass it by. But what was the road by which we reached our position, what the form of government under which our greatness grew, what the national habits out of which it sprang; these are questions which I may try to solve before I proceed to my panegyric upon these men; since I think this to be a subject upon which on the present occasion a speaker may properly dwell, and to which the whole assemblage, whether citizens or foreigners, may listen with advantage.

“Our constitution does not copy the laws of neighbouring states; we are rather a pattern to others than imitators ourselves. Its administration favours the many instead of the few; this is why it is called a democracy. If we look to the laws, they afford equal justice to all in their private differences; if no social standing, advancement in public life falls to reputation for capacity, class considerations not being allowed to interfere with merit; nor again does poverty bar the way, if a man is able to serve the state, he is not hindered by the obscurity of his condition. The freedom which we enjoy in our government extends also to our ordinary life. There, far from exercising a jealous surveillance over each other, we do not feel called upon to be angry with our neighbour for doing what he likes, or even to indulge in those injurious looks which cannot fail to be offensive, although they inflict no positive penalty. But all this ease in our private relations does not make us lawless as citizens. Against this fear is our chief safeguard, teaching us to obey the magistrates and the laws, particularly such as regard the protection of the injured, whether they are actually on the statute book, or belong to that code which, although unwritten, yet cannot be broken without acknowledged disgrace.

“Further, we provide plenty of means for the mind to refresh itself from business. We celebrate games and sacrifices all the year round, and the elegance of our private establishments forms a daily source of pleasure and helps to banish the spleen; while the magnitude of our city draws the produce of the world into our harbour, so that to the Athenian the fruits of other countries are as familiar a luxury as those of his own.

“If we turn to our military policy, there also we differ from our antagonists. We throw open our city to the world, and never by alien acts exclude foreigners from any opportunity of learning or observing, although the eyes of an enemy may occasionally profit by our liberality; trusting less in system and policy than to the native spirit of our citizens; while in education, where our rivals from their very cradles by a painful discipline seek after manliness, at Athens we live exactly as we please, and yet are just as ready to encounter every legitimate danger. In proof of this it may be noticed that the Lacedaemonians do not invade our country alone, but bring with them all their confederates; while we Athenians advance unsupported into the territory of a neighbour, and fighting upon a foreign soil usually vanquish with ease men who are defending their homes. Our united force was never yet encountered by any enemy, because we have at once to attend to our marine and to dispatch our citizens by land upon a hundred different services; so that, wherever they engage with some such fraction of our strength, a success against a detachment is magnified into a victory over the nation, and a defeat into a reverse suffered at the hands of our entire people. And yet if with habits not of labour but of ease, and courage not of art but of nature, we are still willing to encounter danger, we have the double advantage of escaping the experience of hardships in anticipation and of facing them in the hour of need as fearlessly as those who are never free from them.

“Nor are these the only points in which our city is worthy of admiration. We cultivate refinement without extravagance and knowledge without effeminacy; wealth we employ more for use than for show, and place the real disgrace of poverty not in owning to the fact but in declining the struggle against it. Our public men have, besides politics, their private affairs to attend to, and our ordinary citizens, though occupied with the pursuits of industry, are still fair judges of public matters; for, unlike any other nation, regarding him who takes no part in these duties not as unambitious but as useless, we Athenians are able to judge at all events if we cannot originate, and, instead of looking on discussion as a stumbling-block in the way of action, we think it an indispensable preliminary to any wise action at all. Again, in our enterprises we present the singular spectacle of daring and deliberation, each carried to its highest point, and both united in the same persons; although usually decision is the fruit of ignorance, hesitation of reflection. But the palm of courage will surely be adjudged most justly to those, who best know the difference between hardship and pleasure and yet are never tempted to shrink from danger. In generosity we are equally singular, acquiring our friends by conferring, not by receiving, favours. Yet, of course, the doer of the favour is the firmer friend of the two, in order by continued kindness to keep the recipient in his debt; while the debtor feels less keenly from the very consciousness that the return he makes will be a payment, not a free gift. And it is only the Athenians, who, fearless of consequences, confer their benefits not from calculations of expediency, but in the confidence of liberality.

“In short, I say that as a city we are the school of Hellas, while I doubt if the world can produce a man who, where he has only himself to depend upon, is equal to so many emergencies, and graced by so happy a versatility, as the Athenian. And that this is no mere boast thrown out for the occasion, but plain matter of fact, the power of the state acquired by these habits proves. For Athens alone of her contemporaries is found when tested to be greater than her reputation, and alone gives no occasion to her assailants to blush at the antagonist by whom they have been worsted, or to her subjects to question her title by merit to rule. Rather, the admiration of the present and succeeding ages will be ours, since we have not left our power without witness, but have shown it by mighty proofs; and far from needing a Homer for our panegyrist, or other of his craft whose verses might charm for the moment only for the impression which they gave to melt at the touch of fact, we have forced every sea and land to be the highway of our daring, and everywhere, whether for evil or for good, have left imperishable monuments behind us. Such is the Athens for which these men, in the assertion of their resolve not to lose her, nobly fought and died; and well may every one of their survivors be ready to suffer in her cause.

“Indeed if I have dwelt at some length upon the character of our country, it has been to show that our stake in the struggle is not the same as theirs who have no such blessings to lose, and also that the panegyric of the men over whom I am now speaking might be by definite proofs established. That panegyric is now in a great measure complete; for the Athens that I have celebrated is only what the heroism of these and their like have made her, men whose fame, unlike that of most Hellenes, will be found to be only commensurate with their deserts. And if a test of worth be wanted, it is to be found in their closing scene, and this not only in cases in which it set the final seal upon their merit, but also in those in which it gave the first intimation of their having any. For there is justice in the claim that steadfastness in his country’s battles should be as a cloak to cover a man’s other imperfections; since the good action has blotted out the bad, and his merit as a citizen more than outweighed his demerits as an individual. But none of these allowed either wealth with its prospect of future enjoyment to unnerve his spirit, or poverty with its hope of a day of freedom and riches to tempt him to shrink from danger. No, holding that vengeance upon their enemies was more to be desired than any personal blessings, and reckoning this to be the most glorious of hazards, they joyfully determined to accept the risk, to make sure of their vengeance, and to let their wishes wait; and while committing to hope the uncertainty of final success, in the business before them they thought fit to act boldly and trust in themselves. Thus choosing to die resisting, rather than to live submitting, they fled only from dishonour, but met danger face to face, and after one brief moment, while at the summit of their fortune, escaped, not from their fear, but from their glory.

“So died these men as became Athenians. You, their survivors, must determine to have as unfaltering a resolution in the field, though you may pray that it may have a happier issue. And not contented with ideas derived only from words of the advantages which are bound up with the defence of your country, though these would furnish a valuable text to a speaker even before an audience so alive to them as the present, you must yourselves realize the power of Athens, and feed your eyes upon her from day to day, till love of her fills your hearts; and then, when all her greatness shall break upon you, you must reflect that it was by courage, sense of duty, and a keen feeling of honour in action that men were enabled to win all this, and that no personal failure in an enterprise could make them consent to deprive their country of their valour, but they laid it at her feet as the most glorious contribution that they could offer. For this offering of their lives made in common by them all they each of them individually received that renown which never grows old, and for a sepulchre, not so much that in which their bones have been deposited, but that noblest of shrines wherein their glory is laid up to be eternally remembered upon every occasion on which deed or story shall call for its commemoration. For heroes have the whole earth for their tomb; and in lands far from their own, where the column with its epitaph declares it, there is enshrined in every breast a record unwritten with no tablet to preserve it, except that of the heart. These take as your model and, judging happiness to be the fruit of freedom and freedom of valour, never decline the dangers of war. For it is not the miserable that would most justly be unsparing of their lives; these have nothing to hope for: it is rather they to whom continued life may bring reverses as yet unknown, and to whom a fall, if it came, would be most tremendous in its consequences. And surely, to a man of spirit, the degradation of cowardice must be immeasurably more grievous than the unfelt death which strikes him in the midst of his strength and patriotism!

“Comfort, therefore, not condolence, is what I have to offer to the parents of the dead who may be here. Numberless are the chances to which, as they know, the life of man is subject; but fortunate indeed are they who draw for their lot a death so glorious as that which has caused your mourning, and to whom life has been so exactly measured as to terminate in the happiness in which it has been passed. Still I know that this is a hard saying, especially when those are in question of whom you will constantly be reminded by seeing in the homes of others blessings of which once you also boasted: for grief is felt not so much for the want of what we have never known, as for the loss of that to which we have been long accustomed. Yet you who are still of an age to beget children must bear up in the hope of having others in their stead; not only will they help you to forget those whom you have lost, but will be to the state at once a reinforcement and a security; for never can a fair or just policy be expected of the citizen who does not, like his fellows, bring to the decision the interests and apprehensions of a father. While those of you who have passed your prime must congratulate yourselves with the thought that the best part of your life was fortunate, and that the brief span that remains will be cheered by the fame of the departed. For it is only the love of honour that never grows old; and honour it is, not gain, as some would have it, that rejoices the heart of age and helplessness.

“Turning to the sons or brothers of the dead, I see an arduous struggle before you. When a man is gone, all are wont to praise him, and should your merit be ever so transcendent, you will still find it difficult not merely to overtake, but even to approach their renown. The living have envy to contend with, while those who are no longer in our path are honoured with a goodwill into which rivalry does not enter. On the other hand, if I must say anything on the subject of female excellence to those of you who will now be in widowhood, it will be all comprised in this brief exhortation. Great will be your glory in not falling short of your natural character; and greatest will be hers who is least talked of among the men, whether for good or for bad.

“My task is now finished. I have performed it to the best of my ability, and in word, at least, the requirements of the law are now satisfied. If deeds be in question, those who are here interred have received part of their honours already, and for the rest, their children will be brought up till manhood at the public expense: the state thus offers a valuable prize, as the garland of victory in this race of valour, for the reward both of those who have fallen and their survivors. And where the rewards for merit are greatest, there are found the best citizens.

“And now that you have brought to a close your lamentations for your relatives, you may depart.”

by Benjamin Schwarz

Walt’s World

Article Tools

For better and for worse, Walt Disney (1901–1966) implanted his creations more profoundly and pervasively in the national psyche than has any other figure in the history of American popular culture. When the young cartoonist—a product of the worn-down midwestern petite bourgeoisie and of wearisome childhood toil—had his first popular character, Oswald the Rabbit, stolen from him by his film distributor, in 1928, he quickly, in desperation, created a new protagonist: Mickey Mouse. By the early 1930s, a million audiences were watching Mickey Mouse cartoons each year. In 1934, in the depths of the Depression, The Mouse’s image adorned more than forty items, from diamond bracelets to blackboards, bringing in $35 million in domestic sales alone. A year earlier, Disney had released Three Little Pigs, an eight-minute cartoon that was universally regarded as a populist parable of the Depression. It entranced the country; FDR quoted it; dozens of articles dissected it. Its theme song, “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?,” became, along with “Happy Days Are Here Again,” an anthem of the decade. And of course, this was just the beginning. To millions of Americans, a truculent Donald Duck symbolized the good fight against the Axis (“Der Fuehrer’s Face,” the hit song to Disney’s most popular cartoon, was the wartime counterpart to “Big Bad Wolf”).

Disney then gave the postwar generation its deepest common cultural experiences. The releases of Cinderella, Peter Pan, Lady and the Tramp, Mary Poppins, and 101 Dalmatians—and the re­releases of Snow White, Bambi, Pinocchio, and Dumbo (probably Disney Studio’s finest feature)—were among the most universally and vividly experienced childhood events of the American middle class. The Mickey Mouse Club helped raise the children of the 1950s (and supplied Boomers with their own anthem). The broadcasts, on the television show Disneyland, of Davy Crockett (the first miniseries) spurred the biggest kids’ fad of the decade—the “coonskin” cap (10 million of which were sold) became the central element of the middle- class boy’s uniform. The show’s later iteration, Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color, was probably the most significant factor in making color television a fixture in suburban living rooms and helped assuage the peculiar melancholy of the school year’s Sunday nights. Within eleven years of Disneyland’s opening, in 1955, the theme park’s apparently intoxicating blend of nostalgia and futurism, of order, artificiality, and spotlessness, had, according to one assessment, lured roughly a quarter of the country’s population. In the year of Disney’s death, an estimated 240 million people worldwide watched a Disney movie, 100 million saw a Disney television show every week, and 80 million read a Disney book or magazine. To be a mainstream American in the American Century was to inhabit Walt Disney’s world.

Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination

by Neal Gabler
Knopf

But Disney’s career and legacy are a good deal more complicated than that. From the frenetic early Mickey cartoons—which inventively borrowed elements of popular music, comedy, vaudeville, and dance—through the finely wrought shorts and features of the golden age of the Disney studio in the 1930s and early ’40s, to the increasingly sentimental, banal, and uplifty animated and live-action films of the 1950s and ’60s (think Son of Flubber), Disney’s work evolved radically. Although intellectuals of the 1930s and early ’40s lauded Disney more enthusiastically than any other popular entertainer save Chaplin (The Nation declared in 1934 that Mickey Mouse was the “supreme artistic achievement of the moving picture”), they soured on him in the postwar years. By the 1950s, the cultural elite castigated his sensibility and creations, even while the silent majority (as it would soon be known) increasingly and defiantly embraced him as its avatar. His career, then, exposes both monumental shifts in popular entertainment and a concomitant social and cultural divide that remains largely unbridged today.

Though social critics have been assessing Disney’s significance since the early 1930s, the film writer Richard Schickel’s 1968 book, The Disney Version, established the terms of interpretation and debate through which nearly all subsequent works about Disney, including this one, have approached their subject. Gabler—the author of the spiky and authoritative Winchell, among other books—has written an exceptionally intelligent, carefully researched, and absorbing doorstop (it’s more than 800 pages). Although reviewers will call it “definitive,” it tells a story that for the most part Schickel and Steven Watts—in his outstanding and, alas, largely overlooked Magic Kingdom, which places Disney in the richest cultural and historical context—have already related. (Schickel’s remains the most analytically and aesthetically penetrating portrait, but it’s the least detailed and reliable. And while Gabler is wrong to say that Schickel excoriated his subject and “portrayed him as mercenary and mendacious—Schickel in fact stressed Disney’s sincerity and lack of cynicism—the sometimes jarringly intemperate Disney Version was clearly written by an iconoclastic young man in the late 1960s, although one with a remarkably nuanced critical mind.)

MARK CUBAN, the owner of the Dallas Mavericks, has a full plate. Besides his basketball team, the busy billionaire also owns part of a media company, and serves as chairman of the TV channel HDNet. He recently competed for five weeks on “Dancing With the Stars” on ABC. How on earth does he find time to blog?

Yet his site, blogmaverick.com, is one of the top 1,000 Weblogs, according to the search engine Technorati. Thousands read Mr. Cuban’s posts every single day. If he can do it, why can’t you?

“Don’t go into blogging to make a living,” Mr. Cuban warned in an e-mail message. Still, he and other top bloggers with day jobs agree most people could attract a following on the Web. And whether a person blogs to make a little money, to influence opinion or just for sheer ego gratification, amassing a large audience is the goal.

Here’s what a number of successful bloggers with successful nonblogging careers say are the ways to think about getting into the business of blogging.

Don’t expect to get rich. You can easily place automatically served ad banners from Google or AdBrite onto your blog. It is as simple as signing up with an ad service and placing a snippet of HTML code into your blog. Many of the ads will be specific to the topic of your posts and the service will credit your account whenever a reader clicks on one of the ads. You get a check only if the account builds to a set amount, $100 in the case of Google.

But Philip Kaplan, president for products at AdBrite, cautions that only one in six blogs draws even 500 page views a day. At that pace, you would make at most $45 a month, even if the site were decked out with full-page ads. Mr. Kaplan estimates only 3 percent of active sites make more than $1,000 a month from advertising.

“In 3.5 months we made $9.47,” complained one blogger, Ted Dziuba, who yanked the automatic ads off of his site, Uncov.com.

Write about what you want to write about, in your own voice. Mr. Dziuba, a software engineer at Persai, a Web news filtering service, began blogging out of sheer frustration with buggy, overhyped Web 2.0 applications. Uncov.com became a magnet for techies with similar complaints, and unintentionally raised awareness of Persai. Thousands of Uncov readers signed up for a test of Persai’s service. Eventually, even advertisers took notice. “Once I started getting 2,000 to 3,000 page-views per day,” he says, “advertisers started coming to me.” He says advertisers have contacted him directly with offers of $750 for a month of display ads.

Mr. Cuban said: “Blog about your passions. Don’t blog about what you think your audience wants. Post because you have something you are dying to write about.”

Fit blogging into the holes in your schedule. “Deal with the rest of your life first,” advises Glenn Reynolds, a law professor at the University of Tennessee who posts constantly throughout the day on his site, Instapundit.com. The volume and regularity has helped make his political opinion site one of the most popular on the Internet. “The blog is best handled by inserting it into the small bits of free time that rest among the bigger chunks of your work.” Mr. Reynolds slips in posts between classes, as a break from writing law review articles and during slow time at home.

Just post it already! The hurdle that stops many would-be bloggers is fear of clicking the “Publish” button. Xeni Jardin, who juggles blogging at the quirky alternative-news site BoingBoing.net with a career as a freelance journalist for NPR, Wired magazine and others, resists the urge to polish her blog prose the way she would a radio script. “Don’t bottle up your ideas forever believing you have to hit the same kind of mature, complete, perfect point as you would with a magazine or newspaper article,” she says. “Blogs are always in progress.” Boing Boing’s bloggers are known for going back to posts to update them, adding new information and striking out factual errors.

Keep a regular rhythm. Bloggers disagree on how often they should post. Mr. Reynolds and Ms. Jardin post several times a day. Mr. Cuban and Mr. Dziuba will go a week without a post. What matters, they agree, is that you establish a reliable rhythm for readers, so they know they can rely on you to have new material for them every so often.

Likewise, there’s no one right length for blog posts, but the most successful sites seem to have their own reliable formats, just like most professional publications. Mr. Reynolds rarely goes beyond two or three lines per post. Boing Boing entries run one to three paragraphs each, always with a photo. Mr. Cuban’s Blog Maverick entries can take up the entire browser window — when the guy’s on a roll, he’s on a roll.

Join the community, such as it is. There’s an unwritten rule — actually, it’s written about a lot on blogs — that you should always link back to bloggers whose ideas you repeat, or from whom you get a cool link to another site. Don’t use other bloggers’ photos or excerpt their writing without a prominent link back to the original. When in doubt, give credit.

More to the point, linking to other bloggers is the best way to get them to link to you. Links from other bloggers increase your readership two ways: they send readers directly from other sites, and they raise your ranking in search engine results. A blogger who posts about a hot topic like Eliot Spitzer’s secret life, but has no inbound links, will lose out to one who already has dozens of inbound links from other sites.

Plug yourself. That’s what all the name-brand bloggers do. It’s not bad form to send a short note to a prominent blogger drawing his or her attention to a really good blog you wrote. Some bloggers place links to their sites in comments they write on more established blogs. (And some bloggers are on to the trick and refuse to allow it.)

A more direct way to draw a crowd is to submit your blog posts to news aggregation sites like Digg, Fark and Boing Boing. Readers vote on how much they like the posts and new readers are drawn to the list of most popular posts. Granted, it helps if your blog post includes a home video of someone being attacked by a cat or really arrogant e-mail messages from a hedge-fund manager. Those get passed around virally in an instant.

Allowing readers to post comments on your blog not only increases readership, it provides a sense of live interaction with the rest of the world. But beware: the insulting comment is an Internet art form. “There’s a big difference between being flamed on someone else’s blog, and having them come do it in your own home,” Ms. Jardin said.

In the end, the biggest threat isn’t that you’ll fail to learn to blog. It’s that if you blog regularly for long enough, and begin to get comments and links from other bloggers, you’ll have trouble doing your day job.

“I can’t stop reloading,” confessed a colleague over IM after a post of hers began to attract dozens of comments. “I should be working, I know,” she added a few seconds later. “I have an unhealthy obsession.” Isn’t that the whole idea?

Philip Jones Griffiths

British (Welsh), b. 1936, d. 2008

Born in Rhuddlan, Wales, Philip Jones Griffiths studied pharmacy in Liverpool and worked in London while photographing part-time for the Manchester Guardian. In 1961 he became a full-time freelancer for the London-based Observer. He covered the Algerian War in 1962, then moved to Central Africa. From there he moved to Asia, photographing in Vietnam from 1966 to 1971.

His book on the war, Vietnam Inc., crystallized public opinion and gave form to Western misgivings about American involvement in Vietnam. One of the most detailed surveys of any conflict, Vietnam Inc. is also an in-depth document of Vietnamese culture under attack.

An associate member of Magnum since 1966, Griffiths became a member in 1971. In 1973 he covered the Yom Kippur War and then worked in Cambodia between 1973 and 1975. In 1977 he covered Asia from his base in Thailand. In 1980 Griffiths moved to New York to assume the presidency of Magnum, a post he held for a record five years.

Griffiths’ assignments, often self-engineered, took him to more than 120 countries. He continued to work for major publications such as Life and Geo on stories such as Buddhism in Cambodia, droughts in India, poverty in Texas, the re-greening of Vietnam, and the legacy of the Gulf War in Kuwait. His continued revisiting of Vietnam, examining the legacy of the war, lead to his two further books ‘Agent Orange’ and ‘Vietnam at Peace’.

Griffiths’ work reflects on the unequal relationship between technology and humanity, summed up in his book Dark Odyssey. Human foolishness always attracted Griffiths’ eye, but, faithful to the ethics of the Magnum founders, he believed in human dignity and in the capacity for improvement

Philip Jones Griffiths died at home in West London on 19th March 2008

War, Remembrance and Rebuilding in Vietnam

Reuters © 2005

The last U.S. troops left Vietnam three decades ago, marking the end of the Vietnam War. A weeklong series examines the conflict’s legacy on the Southeast Asian nation — the progress since 1975 and the scars left behind.

Vietnam, 30 Years Later

April 25, 2005 · In a weeklong series, NPR’s Michael Sullivan takes a look at Vietnam, 30 years after U.S. troops left the country and the end of the Vietnam War. In the first story, he journeys on the north-south Highway 1, on the border with China. The first stop is Lang Son, a town the Chinese once occupied.

The Vietnam War has been present, if only tangentially, in the fiction of Denis Johnson all along. In Jesus’ Son (1993), a collection of stories and Johnson’s best-known work, one of the minor characters is a draft-dodging kid who appears by the side of the road, hitching his way to Canada. In Fiskadoro (1985), a post-apocalyptic novel set in the Florida Keys in the mid-twenty first century, the only character with distinct memories of the Time Before is a centenarian, now mute, named Grandma Wright, the daughter of an Englishman and his Vietnamese wife. The thing she recalls most vividly is her escape from Vietnam in the last days of the war, on a helicopter that crashed in the China Sea, killing nearly everyone but her. She goes over and over this memory in her mind, working it like a string of worry beads—perhaps the final link to life on earth in the twentieth century.

his past Sunday marked the death of Harvard University’s John Rawls, widely regarded as the most influential political philosopher of the 20th century. I met Rawls once vicariously and once in person; both encounters only confirmed for me his reputation not only a political thinker, but also as a decent and humble man. As to my vicarious connection, much of his great work, A Theory of Justice (1971), was written at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences on the Stanford University campus. His secretary, Anna Tyler, was my secretary some years later. When I handed her a manuscript which included some reference to one of Rawls’s works, she remarked casually that he had had only the most modest ambitions for his book, which he vaguely hoped would be read by a few philosophers before it received the usual fate of most political musings — oblivion. Others have confirmed the same observation: Rawls set out with the idea of getting it just right. He sought no publicity, let alone adoration, and was utterly amazed by the attention that the world paid to his work.

by William Styron December 1989

For the thing which
I greatly feared is come upon me,
and that which I was afraid of
Is come into me.
I was not in safety, neither
had I rest, neither was I quiet;
Yet trouble came. —Job