Sisyphus Understands

Andy,
   Not for the first time in my life, and probably not for the last, I wish I could write with eloquence that you put into everything you said.  Although, what I wish the most is that I wasn’t writing this at all – in that perfect world, I’d still be waiting for your next email, or looking forward to the day when I hear your voice on the phone, telling me how great it is to be home.

   Instead, I’m sitting here thinking about how much I hate the fact that those days will never come.  I think about what you said in your final message, and try as I might, I still can’t quite manage what you asked.  You said not to cry for you, but it is so hard – it hurts so much that sometimes I think I’ll never be able to bear it.  But just so you know (and please don’t be offended), I’m not crying for you, but for myself.

   We both made our choice long ago about who we are, and what profession to pursue, and neither of us ever regretted it (well, not much, anyway).  We were both fortunate to have the chance to be a part of something greater than ourselves, something that we believed in, and that could make such a profound difference in the world.  I’ve always counted myself lucky because of that, I know you did too.

   The sorrow I feel doesn’t come from that choice, or from the circumstances that took you away.  My pain is in knowing that I will never get the chance to hear your voice again, or have you demolish my half formed ideas as you force me to confront my own lazy thinking.   I hate the thought of a world without you in it, and the sadness that overwhelms me is for myself and all who knew you and have to go on without you – and for all who will never get to know you now.

   And I feel guilt.  For all of the things I could have done differently while you were here.  I could have called more often, written more regularly, come out to see you and Amanda more often than I did.  I could have been a better friend, and I’m sorry – I took your friendship for granted too often, because I never truly thought that someday you would be gone.  Now its too late, and I can never do what I should have done in the first place, and tell you how much you meant to me.

   You were my friend. You were never too busy to talk, were always ready with a joke or an insight that I needed, and you always had more faith in me than I did.  You opened your home and your heart to me, and made me feel that I would never be a stranger as long as you were there.  You were my brother, if not by blood, then in spirit.

   Something that I realize now, too late, is that in your life you fought more battles than most of us ever imagine.  You showed me that a soldier fights not only on the battlefield, but also in the realm of ideas.  You believed, as so many have forgotten, that words matter – that ideas can change the world.  With your words, you tried to get people to think, to look beyond the surface and truly understand the world around them.  I think that you always hoped that you could help people to understand one another, and maybe even discover something new.  I think you might appreciate this quote:

G'Quan wrote, there is a greater darkness than the one we fight. It is the darkness of the soul that has lost its way. The war we fight is not against powers and principalities. It is against Chaos and Despair. Greater than the death of flesh is the death of hope, the death of dreams. Against this peril we can never surrender.
                        Citizen G’Kar
                        Babylon 5

   Of all the people I have ever known, you never succumbed to that darkness of the soul.  In many ways you were the light that helped us to see, so that we didn’t have to fear the dark so much.  Now that light is gone, and we find ourselves in darkness once more.  But having seen the light once, we know that it can come again, if we have the strength of will to make it ourselves.  You showed us the path.

   I still have not come to grips with the pain of your loss.  Sometimes I doubt that I ever will.  All I know is that I have to keep moving forward, because I would hate the thought of what you would say to me if I stay mired in the past.

   Somewhere, if the smart folks who write physics papers are to be believed, there are other universes, some similar to our own, some almost indistinguishable.  And in one of those, events unfolded differently that day, and you and I are sitting somewhere talking about what a close thing it was for you.  I take some comfort in that thought, and pray that its true – it may seem foolish, but it helps make the emptiness a little more bearable.

   For this universe, though, it is all too real.  Good-bye, my friend.  Someday, God willing, I’ll see you again at Fiddler’s Green.

(Note:  I had originally intended to post this on January 3rd, but the events of that week overshadowed everything else.)

WARNING - Spoilers ahead!

Household 6 and I went to see "I Am Legend" for our New Year's celebration (hey, when the spouse is 6 months pregnant, you have to tone it down a little, ok?).  Being a huge fan of the book and the previous movies, not to mention an admirer of Will Smith's acting, I had my hopes pretty high for this movie.  Fortunately for our holiday, the movie delivered in nearly every area.

I thought the depicition of New York after the eradication of 99% of the human race was positively eerie.  Seeing places I know devoid of human life, being reclaimed by the wild, really set the mood for the film.  I can honestly say that this was one of the first movies in a long time that had me tense with anticipation at every turn (I think the last was "28 Days Later").  As usual, Will was fantastic - he is probably one of the best contemporary actors I can name, and the way he portrayed Neville as a man slowly going insane from isolation was incredibly moving.  Sad to say, Charlton Heston's portrayal now seems a little lackluster in comparison.

I have only two gripes with the film (aside from the science, which is always a little shaky in the movies, but I'm willing to suspend disbelief some for a good yarn).  The first is the most serious, and that's the math of the virus.

In the course of explaining why there can't be any other survivors, Neville discourses on how the disease was 90% fatal, and reveals that only .2% of the population were immune, while the rest became the infected creatures hunting them (using his math of 12 million immune to 588 million infected, that works out to be a fifth of a percent of the total population).  12 million people, spread over the whole world, is certainly pretty sparse, but the problem is that they wouldn't be evenly distributed.  Consider Manhattan, with a permanent population of roughly 2,000,000.  Using Neville's math, that would mean that after the plague there would be about 196,000 infected roaming the city, and nearly 4,000 immune survivors.  4,000!

Now, admittedly, a lot of those survivors wouldn't last long with the infected hunting them down for food.  Some would be elderly, some too young to survive.  Others wouldn't have the ability or the skills to adequately defend themselves.  But I have to think that in 4,000 people, there would be at least a few who would have the tenacity and skills to band together and survive.  Of course, you could make the argument for the movie's sake that all of these people abandoned the city shortly after the fall of civilization in order to find a more hospitable place to live (Manhattan not being known for its farmland, or other sustainable attributes), but all told, I think the writers missed the mark on their explanation of why there was no one else in the city.

My other gripe is the religious aspect that was brought in at the very end.  I have no objection to the concept itself, but it seemed almost an afterthought in the movie - it really had no connection to the overall plot, and it was not developed in any significant way.  Remove that device and the movie would not have suffered a bit.

Still, even with my gripes, an excellent movie!  I'm looking forward to the DVD, and hoping they have a good chunk on the behind the scenes stuff.