I'm not generally one of those people who's particularly touched by the passing of a high profile celebrity who I've never met and and can't claim to know. I don't think I'm heartless - I'm sure that the friends and family of the famous person are devastated and I feel a moment's sadness for them, but in a world of six billion people, you can't cry for everyone and the loss felt by those those close to the famous person is no more or less than that of millions of others bereft of someone they love just as dearly but who never made the headlines.
The loss which you only notice peripherally when glancing at a short paragraph on the inside page of a your free paper ("local mother dies after long illness") is just as real and raw as the death of somebody whose obituaries fill the TV news broadcasts and national newspapers - cause for a brief twinge of regret and sympathy, but no more, assuming you actually want to find time to pass your own life doing something other than mourning the passing of every stranger on Earth.
Occasionally, though, I do hear of the death of someone I've never met and feel a genuine sense of loss, when that person's work has inspired, amused, enlightened, or in some other way enriched my life. Inevitably, as I get older, I find that some of those who I've never met, but who made my world a brighter place are slipping away. Here are five from this century who left a gap:
Stephen Jay Gould - died May 20th 2002
An evolutionary scientist and writer of popular science books, he also had extraordinarily broad mental horizons, informing his books with his eclectic knowledge of and interest in history, the history of science, music, baseball, popular culture, literature and religion.
But it he wasn't just a polymath - he was also a an independently minded and very compassionate man, whose greatest service to his field of evolutionary biology was perhaps to point out forcefully that evolution is just a mechanism we see producing results in the natural world and not, as some more over-enthusiastic evolutionary psychologists have tried to argue, applicable to human morality, something which we should have the empathy and intelligence to work out for ourselves from first principles.
Erudite, endlessly curious and humane he was a bit of a renaissance man. I didn't always agree with him (for example I don't buy his idea that science and religion occupy wholly "non-overlapping magisteria" and should coexist quite happily without coming into conflict), but have always respected his courage (physical as well as moral, when facing cancer) and the sheer kindliness of the man.
John Peel (John Robert Parker Ravenscroft) - died October 25th 2004
To a rather gloomy late 1970's teenager who didn't quite fit in, discovering the John Peel show on Radio 1 was a revelation. A disc jockey who wasn't an over-excited dimwit filling the space between records with mental candy floss was a rare find in those days. Urbane, witty, avuncular, with a mind which went off on lots of interesting tangents, he also played music which you might not have always liked or understood, but which had flashes of strange brilliance. I remember lying in bed the first time I heard him play Laurie Anderson's O Superman and thinking "what the hell is that?" but enjoying the fact that it was eerily unlike anything I'd ever heard.
I'm still not very musically knowledgeable and my tastes have probably become dull and middle-aged in a way that Peel's never did, but his enthusiasm and persona were always a benign presence in the background of my formative years, like a wonderful virtual uncle, as I'm sure he has been to many other teenagers who discovered him at various points in his long and varied broadcasting career.
Linda Smith - died February 27th 2006
Voted the wittiest person on Radio 4, she was just an effortlessly funny performer. She combined having strong views (humanist, left-of-centre) with having a down to earth personality and warmth, which saved her comedy riffs from being rants. A sparkling antidote to the dreary pomposity of our PR-ridden age, she was sadly missed following her early death from ovarian cancer.
Arthur C Clarke - died March 19th 2008
It was the early 1970's. I'd already been incomprehendingly excited as a child by Thunderbirds, Star Trek and watching the moon landings, I'd been bought a copy of a magazine called Speed and Power, chiefly aimed, in those gender-stereotyped days at boys, which dealt with such fascinating topics as aeroplanes, fast cars, boats and rockets. At the back of the magazine was a science fiction short story by Arthur C Clarke, called Summertime on Icarus.
It was a relatively simple story. What gripped me at the time was the combination of imagination, strangeness and reality. Tiny Icarus, with it's airless skies, impossibly close horizon, dreamlike microgravity and infernal temperatures is an utterly alien place. Yet it's also a real place, described in precise detail. Not only real because Arthur C Clarke's imagination could make the non-existent come to life (although he could do that, too). But real in the sense that it actually exists out there, indeed Icarus is a place which humans could visit with existing technology (if anyone wanted to spend the money on such a project).
It's this combination of the imaginative with the reality of how awesomely strange the universe actually is, which gripped me. I devoured subsequent short stories in Speed and Power and went on to read Clarke's short story collections, novels and non-fiction. That experience gave me something infinitely valuable - a sense of perspective, of how miniscule my life, my experiences, my home planet, everything I know is, in comparison with a universe which is incomprehensibly huge and ancient and full of mystery. Excitement, awe, a little fear, a little pride that humans have been able to use reason to throw some light on a little part of that enormous mystery. Although Clarke was a secular humanist and so am I, I guess the feeling does have almost spiritual overtones - I may not do religion, but that doesn't mean I'm not occasionally overcome by feelings of wonder which transcend the construct I call "myself".
Humphrey Lyttleton - died 25th April 2008
I don't know a lot about jazz - I like a handful of pieces, but am shamefully ignorant about the form as a whole, so I can't say a lot about him as a jazz man. But as the long-standing host of I'm Sorry I haven't a Clue, he was just about the world's finest exponent of deadpan humour and wicked comic timing. In a world which sometimes seems to have precious little to laugh about, providing so many years of hilarity was a gift beyond price.
For some we loved, the loveliest and the best
That from his Vintage rolling Time hath prest,
Have drunk their Cup a Round or two before,
And one by one crept silently to rest.
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