Missing People
By Monday morning I would have travelled 10,600 miles from home and back in four days. We forget how extraordinary it is that such a nature-defying experience is now so banal.
Its my first time in California, I came to be part of a gathering of people celebrating the life of an absolute superstar academic in my field. 48 hours before we were to meet he passed away, in a week where he also submitted his final paper on patent law and semiotics. During the day we had four panels of speakers on his works on the internet, patent law, gender and sociology showing how widely he wrote. I heard he had seen the list of people who were coming to the event and was surprised that so many would come from so far away at short notice, and that to me more than justified the round trip.
The people who spoke were a mix of his contemporaries, mid-level and junior scholars. What felt so extraordinary was that apart from his stellar writing (and I do not mean that in a gratuitous way), people seemed to really know him as a full spectrum human being, feminist and as one of my panellist said - a real mensch. We talked in different ways about what motivated him, how much he read, what family meant to him, how he treated other scholars, his steadfast friendships, his strong sense of community, and his very low tolerance for academic preening and performance. This is relatively rare to non-existent in British academia. (why, will have to be another post).
I feel grateful and humbled to be invited in to this group. I had something I had wanted to say to him. On my panel, we went in alphabetic order so was scheduled to speak after his best friend and equally or more super-star academic - a George Clooney to his Tom Cruise stature. His talk was moving, emotional and beautifully stated. I found it hard to speak after that but delivered what I had prepared in an imperfect way knowing the day wasn’t really about me.
At the reception after, I had just spoken to his bereaved wife when I saw her gesture towards a passing tray of food and take something of it to eat. I went over and asked if I could make her a plate of food, to which she said OK. So I put some watermelon, some cheese and some empanadas on a plate and she sat down to eat it. Strangely and only in the aftermath of that moment, did I feel I had brought all of myself to the commemoration.
I learnt many things about the value of knowing and appreciating your place in the world this day - one of a handful of life-defining days whose memory I will hold very close.
A California sunset.