Regarding Roger Ebert

Now let’s regard Roger Ebert this afternoon. What his passing yesterday, Thursday the 4th of April 2013, can mean. Like any death that strikes your radar, knocking it off the table, you feel a need to inventory yourself.

Most of what I could say I chiseled nearly two years ago, when I presented him, by Internet connection, the 2011 Ernie Pyle Lifetime Achievement Award of the National Society of Newspaper Columnists, serving as its president.

This week, the first lesson is obvious: Living life to the fullest. He did. Amazing. Second, working till the literal end. He did. Crazy dude. The third lesson can only be to put Nos. 1 and 2 together: Doing what you love. That is fortune.

These lessons just come from the last decade of his life. Cancer was first diagnosed in 2002. His partner-in-crime Gene Siskel, to give perspective, died in 1999, in his early 50s. Roger lost his voice, to cancer and its surgeries, in 2006. This June, Roger would’ve been 71.

What about lessons from other parts of his life? Well, Roger was lucky, so what can we really learn of his young and middle years?

He was lucky and also brilliant. Lucky being in the right places at the right time. Being an Illinois kid meant moving to any of the main newspapers in the state was only hard, not impossible. Plus those were true metros, as Chicago is not some Indianapolis or Omaha. Or Little Rock. Getting a movie critic berth so young. That was lucky, open-minded good editors with eyes for talent. Yet those folks would not have any idea what a huge and unique talent they had birthed.

Lucky and brilliant and indefatigable. Roger worked like a horse, if horses — even Clydesdale draft horses — can be said to work like humans do when we are driven by our own motives. Only people do that to themselves.

There is a Be True to Yourself element to Roger Ebert. He figured himself out to a small extent before the first TV show in the mid-1970s — as evidenced by a Pulitzer Prize arriving early, at age 33 — then came into self-acceptance wholly years later. He’s written that the process was gradual — the Pulitzer, the TV show, becoming sober, finding a great wife and so on.

Roger must have had both a tremendous ego but only a nearly equal humility. The humility must’ve been in check. You cannot get anywhere thinking less of yourself.

Yes, Roger could say, he could write, whatever he thought. But he earned that privilege. He did not write particularly personally until he began his blog after his cancer was diagnosed.

Can I be inspired by these facts?

There is this: Say I wake up beginning tomorrow — not today because I’ve been up for hours — and tell myself: What can I do today to make a difference? Not any idealistic nonsense of how can I — I of all people — improve the world or be kind to others? That is my default, trying to be nice and avoiding being mean. For all the good that does.

I mean, selfishly. How can I make a difference to myself, to my state of mind, even to the state of my little family. I don’t need to do six impossible things, either. I can write and post. I can look for meaningful work. I can quit berating myself for not applying for crap jobs, even when that seems to be all that’s around.

He did not post in his Roger Ebert’s Journal to illuminate the world with his wisdom, at least not directly. It’s obvious, and I have been a fairly faithful reader, that he wrote for himself, to explain himself to himself, to understand himself. A part of that, a good part of the time, was examining his mistakes and also understanding how he made the good decisions, too. Of course he had to realize these would help others.

The best writing advice always has been to write to satisfy yourself, not some “other,” be it family, friends or Lord help us, the “market.” Yet you do commit to communicate to others by writing on a device, be it paper pad or pixel board. A private diary is meant to be read sometime, OK, after you’re dead. A blog is meant for reading now.

By writing you admit you’d like to be read by others at some point. If you didn’t commit to recording thoughts in a way that would make sense — decent enough grammar, heeding spell-check — by gosh you would just keep to thinking these things silently or talking to yourself. Lots of people do.

Life vanishes if you only think about life. Pictures help, glad we’ve got cameras, for all of us who cannot draw. Talking to others — storytelling — is wonderful, but its permanance the most fragile.

For a few thousand years we humans have farmed, built machines and written. Yes, for all but the last three centuries universal literacy was as abstract a goal as human rights and civil liberties. Thus nearly all the old tales are lost.

It’s not the case now. I can write and read, you can read and write. And we are living in a time when we can read Roger Ebert reflecting about walking through London with a young grandson, searching for hot chocolate.

Copyright 2013 Ben S. Pollock