11/22/1963 ~ 50 Years Gone

  Those of us "of a certain age" remember the assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy on November 11th, 1963. It was a moment when our entire world stood still in shock and grief. When we wondered what could have altered so dramatically in our lives that we could be witness to the killing of a popular president.

Kennedy's death rocked our sense of safety and well-being. It made us realize that even the 'mighty' and those who lived in Camelot could be torn asunder.

There was another death that occurred that same day. This man was older, perhaps wiser, certainly more experienced, and British, although he died in Los Angeles.  He is known to most of us only through the works he wrote, particularly the words of Brave New World:

• Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly -- they'll go through anything. You read and you're pierced.
• But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.
• I want to know what passion is. I want to feel something strongly.

What do you remember of each of these men? How did their lives ~ and their deaths affect you? How did their words affect you?

The Secret of Genius

Aldous Huxley was one of the great and open minds of the 20th century. When he died on November 22, 1963 at age 69, he left behind a legacy of having the 'secret of genius' of which he speaks here. It takes remarkable strength and resiliency to maintain that spirit of the child: the innocence, trust and wonder that animates the child's movements through his or her personal world as well as the more expansive outside world. Those characteristics are the reason for childlike enthusiasm.

Huston Smith wrote the following to honor the 25th anniversary of Aldous Huxley's death:

He loved the desert, he told me, for its symbolic power. Its emptiness emptied his mind. "The boundlessness of its sands [I paraphrase] spreads a mantle of sameness - hence unity - over the world's multiplicity in something of the way snow does. The nothingness to which the Deseret fathers were drawn is not a blank negation. It is a no-thing-ness in which everything is so interfused that divisions are transcended. Pure light contains all the frequencies of the rainbow, but undemarcated. The Void is the vacuum-plenum complex, grasped by its vacuum pole."             And Live Rejoicing, p. 161

May you always carry that spirit of the child within you!