Again about Paul Newman

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Ordinarily, when some good old man goes to sleep, laden with achievement and deserved admiration, followed by mourning and universal love, I manage to reconcile myself with the loss. Death at an advanced age, after a fruitful and meritorious life, is not such an evil; and this world is not our true home anyway. So it was when Pope John Paul II died, so when Jack Kirby passed away, so with Katharine Hepburn or Georges Dumezil or Mario Luzi. But I find that the death of Paul Newman is harder to get over than that; and I think I know why. Like all the true greats of Hollywood, Newman built and occupied a place in our imagination as much as in our experience. He had become a part of a shared mythology or imaginative world, shared with most of mankind, and he may be said to have lived as much in the imagination of mankind as in his own skin. And the imaginative vision he projected was that of Cool Hand Luke: of luminous, defiant, bright youth, ironical, electric and unconquerable. To hear that Paul Newman has died is almost like hearing that youth itself has gone out of the world.

Comments

[wade-scott.livejournal.com]

My inner pessimist would like to add that the loss of good men and women leaves such a void in the world because there are so few able to take their place.