I’m susceptible to hero-worship. I idolize certain souls, living and dead, real and imaginary. I would do anything for them, if summoned. They inhabit my dreams.

This differs from loving. Love is practical as well as passionate, reciprocal not helpless. In love my individuality does not disappear. Love strategizes, it does not idolize: what’s best for us both, all things considered. I love loving, try to be good at it, but love is sane.

Hero-worship is bonkers, disquieting, accusatory. One pines for a glance from one’s sublime. In their service, one risks dangerous mistakes. Such heroes are not real, but visions. So what they had feet of clay, they glow with a preternatural radiance, daring and taunting me in their direction.

I wake curious. No passion is accidental. What glory in these heroes does my mediocrity crave? What emptiness invites their strength? It’s shameful, this abjection, but thrilling too, like being seized by an eagle’s talons and dangled from a great height (a recurrent metaphor in my spew).

The condition is more common than confessed. Thomas Carlyle, Freud, Jung, Erich Fromm, Eric Erikson, and Joseph Campbell weighed in on it, to name a few. Their speculations interest me as touchpoints. But none of them knew me. Maybe by mucking around in my mind I might retrieve an explanation for this humiliation.

Shakespeare, as ever, offers a clue. He too suffered this sickness – and diagnosed it as such. In his sonnets he’s so smitten we cringe, “No, Will, you’re not that pretty boy’s inferior!” All of his plays, one could argue – comedies, tragedies, histories, romances – feature crazed victims of misleading rapture. Theseus, in his early masterpiece, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, muses about the phenomenon. I append the whole speech below, in part to explain Shakespeare’s permanence in my pantheon. Theseus is a practical, no-nonsense, all-business head of state, perplexed by the wackiness of this night’s events. The poet, the madman, and the lover, he theorizes, are three instances of the same distraction, souls victimized by a vision which enslaves them. He summarizes his findings in impossibly untheatrical lines, as if concluding a research report:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedSuch tricks hath strong imagination,That if it would but apprehend some joy,It comprehends some bringer of that joy.

In other words, if one’s delirious with audacious belief, one yearns to specify a cause.

Why my delirium? In reaction, I’m pretty sure, to the starchy propriety of my youth, comme il faut to a fault. I was a good lad, obedient, pleasing, but in hindsight a robot, boringly compliant, not a self worth knowing. My heroes, in their various ways, proclaimed “Fuck you!” to their status quo. They perceived a better way, better for all mankind, and stuck to it, despite opposition and cost. My heroes – saint, poet, painter, composer, darer for humanity – all succeeded in the end, became great, though their attempt may have killed them. They’d had, in that old phrase, “the courage of their convictions,” or more than courage, surrender to their ideal.

Why couldn’t I be like that!

But I was timid, timorous, proper, careful, only secretly subversive, where I wouldn’t get caught, a good lad until all I’d sought to appease were shoveled into the ground. I did some good stuff, but it wasn’t the stuff I dreamed. Except in thrilling solitude, I’d spent my time marking time.

I waited until almost too late to live, in Thoreau’s words, “the life you imagine.” But not too late. Love, luck, and retirement freed me to become what I might. Frantic after my late start, I sprint to catch up. Thank God.

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Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedLovers and madmen have such seething brains,Such shaping fantasies, that apprehendMore than cool reason ever comprehends.The lunatic, the lover and the poetAre of imagination all compact:One sees more devils than vast hell can hold,That is, the madman: the lover, all as frantic,Sees Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt:The poet’s eye, in fine frenzy rolling,Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;And as imagination bodies forthThe forms of things unknown, the poet’s penTurns them to shapes and gives to airy nothingA local habitation and a name.Such tricks hath strong imagination,That if it would but apprehend some joy,It comprehends some bringer of that joy;Or in the night, imagining some fear,How easy is a bush supposed a bear!