Harmonica scats free
up to breathe fresher air,
flash of worn silver
familiar from a pocket,
winks metallic capped teeth.
Polished by nights,
slipped under cheap pillows,
after the Jazz venues
push memories unscored
fumbling late into the streets.
Scents of bottled beer spilt
across tables linger on,
long after the morning lamps
hit the off home switch.
Cupped hands hold a tune,
eyebrows betray stray notes.
A sweep of a mouth line
taps bleary phrases in time
with muddied sole shoes
before departure is the request.
Light is almost here again,
time to dream of Adler, Coltrane,
as the dark blues turn
a softened horizon pale red.
You cannot change the cards you are dealt. Just how you play the hand.
With his child’s smile and nimble brain and breathtakingly simple instructions tumbling out one after another, Pausch made the infernally complex machine that is modern life look like anyone could put it together if they just had the right tools and the crib sheet. Come on, he seemed to say, you can do this; I have the secrets, and I’m giving them to you, for free.
Don’t complain. Just work harder.
Luck is truly where preparation meets opportunity.
When his cancer was diagnosed in August 2006, doctors said he had maybe a few months. He went through an aggressive course of treatment, surgery, chemotherapy; but a year later the disease had spread to his liver and spleen, and he was told it was terminal. A popular computer-science professor at Carnegie Mellon University, he delivered his “Last Lecture” on September 18, 2007. It was a university tradition for popular professors to think hard about what mattered most to them and distill their ideas as though they had only one message left to give to the generation that followed. Randy Pausch was the first for whom the exercise was literal.
Experience is what you get when you didn’t get what you wanted.
It became a YouTube sensation, viewed many millions of times by people charmed by his easy manner, engaged by his lively insights into work, science, exploration, in awe of his complete lack of self-pity. He was the picture of health, with his thick dark hair and Muppet eyebrows, dropping to do push-ups on the stage, a defiant portrait of life with its edges all sharpened. Every sentence was soaked in gratitude, and listening to it could make you flinch at every time you’d whined or cheated or quit.
The brick walls are there for a reason. The brick walls are not there to keep us out; the brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something. The brick walls are there to stop the people who don’t want it badly enough.
You wondered whether, all across the country, children were whipping out the brushes and paint while parents stood resignedly by, remembering the pictures he showed of his own bedroom growing up, covered in doodles and math problems and rocket ships, and honoring his injunction.
“If your kids want to paint their bedrooms, as a favor to me, let ‘em do it.”
Last October Pausch appeared on Oprah, and his audience widened even further. He testified before Congress for better cancer-research funding. He got 10,000 e-mails recommending possible therapies. He spent a day hanging out with the Pittsburgh Steelers, which he’d mentioned as his own childhood dream. ABC News did a prime-time special in which we got to meet his wife Jai, his three young children, watch them playing and planning for what lay ahead.
In April his book, The Last Lecture, swooped high on the best-seller list; his wife called it a “manual” for their family.
Wise men have said they’re not scared of death, but they’re a little scared of dying. Death is just a mystery; but dying is the journey we don’t want to take, and he used it to lead the living to a new place. It was as though he already knew more than he should, had dipped a ways into eternity and brought some pieces back for the rest of us to use in whatever ways and for whatever time we can.
The end of the lecture, it turned out, was just the beginning.
Did you figure out the head fake? It’s not about how to achieve your dreams. It’s about how to lead your life. If you lead your life the right way … the dreams will come to you. Did you figure out the second head fake? The talk’s not for you. It’s for my kids.
Olympus has known the music
that inspires gods and mortals alike.
Euphrosyne, Aglaia, and Thalia sung
with the muses. Goodwill fruited
in renewed boughs of garden blossom
that dispersed a philosophers’ age,
Aristotle, Plato, Socrates,
their thoughtful kind.
And in time, creation cast
these flowers to the four winds,
integrated as a white mist
into each hemisphere. A different soil
covered the world’s founding cities,
grounded art as musical heartbeats
if man listened intently, dreamed
in quavers, minims, crotchets.
Eurynome nodded to Aphrodite,
Aphrodite bid Apollo play upon his lyre,
even Zeus lightened his stern moods,
and the maidens danced, three graces
which were not individual splendors,
charms or ideals of beauty,
but a balance of artful companions;
myth’s petals that composed a true bloom
in an afternoon lull for mankind.
Eurynome smiled,
“Mortals might prove entertaining,
who knows if not we?,
for even we gods become bored
sometimes”, she joked with Pan,
concealing one of Eros’s arrows
in Zeus’s stuffed chair.
*
“The gods too are fond of a joke.”
- Aristotle (384-322 B.C.)
Hello sir stroke madam,
hrm, just my little joke, sir.
The old ones are the best, as I always
say to the coke vendor, humourless,
arrogant, bastard that machine is.
Pepsi tastes just as good, yeah, up
yours pal.
Please insert coins,
thank you, Mr Gates,
and may I add you’re looking particulary
handsome and erudite today.
(why do I feel compelled to say that?)
Hot or cold? hot, okay!
Sugar? Good choice.
White or brown?
Or as we like to call
it in the trade, artificial flavouring
of unknown origin.
Remind me to send you
down a spoon,
you lucky, lucky person!
Milk or molten? Right,
right we are then.
Some call it just this side of volcanic, but
powdered milk does take the edge off.
Milk it is, sir.
No, no trouble at all.
Now just go in for the cup,
that’s right, just grab it.
Oh, extra hot water,
I really have no idea
how that happened and you
dropped it, oh dear.
Sorry, no change or refunds given,
company policy.
