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Signed With Their Honor

© Thomas James Martin

I think continually of those who
were truly great.
Who, from the womb, remembered the soul's history
Through corridors of light where the hours are suns
Endless and singing
--Stephen Spender.

An interviewer once asked Ernest Hemingway for his definition of a writer. Doubtless, the great artist and incomparable prose stylist answered this question many times in his celebrated life, but on this occasion, he thought for a few seconds and then replied that a writer is someone with a "built-in crap detector."

As a sometime writer, I like to think that I at least have the junior version of this inestimable machine. Thus, it is that my own "crap detector" goes off every time the media rolls out the hype whenever the latest celebrity passes on to the Great Publicity Agent in the Sky.

Inevitably, the celebrities are mostly movie stars, sports figures, politicians, or politicians' spouses. For instance, as much as I admired the baseball legend, Joe DiMaggio, his death, the same week, overshadowed remembrance of the great film director, Stanley Kubrick (2001, A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange and many other masterworks of world cinema).

Overshadowed even more that week were probably the deaths of lots of less well-known mortals, who were perhaps too busy being helpful teachers, caring counselors, heroic firefighters or police officers, brilliant scientists, insightful writers or artists, or great parents raising amazing children to inconvenience themselves with the trappings of fame and fortune.

Sometimes the world seems exactly backwards from the way we think it should be. Indeed, we are always seeing everything reversed: After all, my right hand is your left hand from my point of view. Sometimes it seems as if the people who deserve recognition for their contributions to humankind never get that acknowledgment, while those of limited mind and spirit are all too often trumpeted by the media. Thus, we look up to hunks and "hunkettes" who play heroes and heroines or dress their bodies fashionably or who have refined the twin arts of double-talk and deceit to the most rarefied levels rather than less glamorous but more straightforward people living real lives as real heroes, real heroines.

I do not mean to be too hard on the movie stars, models and other celebrities. Sure, they have their place in our society. However, this essay is a celebration of all the great souls who are not great celebrities, who are not particularly famous, who are sometimes known only regionally or locally or often only within a small circle of friends, if at all.