Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedAll my life I’ve compared myself to Christ. – Samuel Beckett

Who are your heroes?

Do you have any – great souls you revere, whom you remember, revisit, honor with homage, by whose examples you warm yourself, whose reputation you protect? Assemble them. What traits do they share? What enlarges them to giants in your thoughts?

I exclude from this meditation living heroes. A few have blessed me, but to mention any would be to miff many and invite controversy. We live in a sneering, dyspeptic epoch, where magnanimity is mocked as fatuity and noble sentiments are adjudged self-interest. “No man is a hero to his valet,” it’s been said, and the incessant intrusion of cameras makes us all valets to the celebrated. Science dissects motives and dismisses the divine. The press and social media prefer tearing down to building up: who gossips about good news?

Admiration reflects aspiration: we worship what we wish we were. My heroes, I notice (this game is new to me too), fall into six categories: thinkers, writers, composers, painters, leaders, saints. No athletes, actors, executives, gangsters, cowboys, warriors, or thugs. Jesus, whom I’m high on, I categorize a saint, leader, writer, not the son of God. My heroes are all mortal, flawed, frail with human frailties, afraid. What guts does it take to be a god? With immortality in the bag, they’ve got it made in the shade.

My heroes all excelled in their line, of course, but excellence alone doesn’t earn them my idolatry. They must have suffered, risked all, braved daunting dangers, perhaps died for their ideal. To “give one’s life” is not to waste it, as the Nameless One asserts, but to gain it.

All my heroes are bent on doing their best for their kind. If they’re thinkers, they dare to say what they see, come what may. If makers, they press expression beyond the parameters of propriety. If leaders, they do not quail. Some of my heroes may be abominable in other aspects of their lives (Wagner comes to mind), but in what they make, do, think, they are intrepid.

And their best is never good enough. Satisfactory is not an adjective in their lexicon. We feel in their creations or careers a restless dissatisfaction with the achievable. They must make or do what none have made or done before. They feel themselves instruments of a transcendent authority, to which they owe – in uber-hero Lincoln’s words – “the last full measure of devotion.”

I gasp at their gifts. How on earth! Their presence in my sky encourages me upwards as the sun does flowers. They may make mind-boggling mistakes: what, I keep asking myself, was Shakespeare thinking when he wrote that profoundly despicable Troilus and Cressida! Step boldly and missteps are assured. At their best, they’re the best, defying gravity, discovering new worlds, proliferating possibilities for those who follow.

The more I see of humanity, the less I admire us. In greed, stupidity, cruelty, mendacity, turpitude, we exceed my wildest expectations. If God made us, He botched the job. No hero He.

My heroes contradict this conclusion. Their goodness gives me hope, their courage encourages, their strength strengthens. Comparing my meagerness to their might makes me strive harder, higher – not to match them, but exceed myself.

Do I exaggerate their magnificence? No doubt – but so what? That’s what love does. We enrobe those we love in raiment impossibly bright. Was Thoreau a misfit and misanthrope, Montaigne a misogynist? You bet – but not to me. All souls are flawed but few are glorious.

Just thinking about heroes moves me to overwrite. Oh well.