... lives sublime

Taps and Reveille

“Seven blunders of the world that lead to violence: wealth without work, pleasure without conscience, knowledge without character, commerce without morality, science without humanity, worship without sacrifice, politics without principle.” Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948)

Some will remember with me Gandhi as a man of our lifetime, Gandhi as a person, a humble being, a man of noachic righteousness, of gentleness and messianic goodness. That I lived in the age of the consummately evil Stalin and Hitler, Pol Pot and now ISIS, and of our viciously bitter political system, is redeemed by having breathed air in the same world and time as Mahatma Gandhi.

Mahatma Gandhi. I feel that way also about Martin Luther King, Jr. And especially about Winston Churchill, war hero of the ages. Winston died when I was on Navy assignment in Taipei and I listened over Armed Forces Radio and Television Service to his state funeral.

“Lives of great men all remind us,” wrote Longfellow, “we can make our lives sublime, and, departing, leave behind us, footprints in the sands of time.”

I lived also in the lifetime of Robert Frost, and personally watched and heard him lecture at the University of Florida when I was a freshman there sixty-one years ago. If Harry Golden is my favorite essayist, Robert Frost is my favorite poet for writing what I feel and know in my heart about life. Including “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” and especially “The Road Not Taken.”

Have I made my life sublime? Well, in this predawn, smelling salt air and watching navigation lights flash in the darkness of St. Andrews Bay -- the loves, even the dreams and yearnings and the roads not taken --