To enjoy the music in today’s post, please click the link above in your email, or click here.
Today’s post comes from my friend, Joe Nagy.
The ancient Greeks had a saying: “Call no man happy until he is dead.”
The implication is that a change of fortune may make even the happiest person miserable. They also warned us that much of our suffering is the result of our own folly.
But the opposite is also true. Suffering and failure can be transformed into a life of meaning and purpose.
I have taken up the habit of reading the Obituary section of the New York Times. I like the idea that each life reads like a novel. There is a beginning, a middle, and an end. One of the lessons I have learned is that good endings are a lot harder to achieve than good beginnings.
The character actor Charles Durning died last year at age 89. His most memorable role was falling in love with Dustin Hoffman in the movie “Tootsie.” He was also a standout as a wily Southern governor in “O Brother, Where Art Thou?”
Durning seemed to have spent his early life escaping death. He was born in poverty in upstate New York. Five of his sisters died in childhood from smallpox or scarlet fever.
He enlisted in the army in World War II, and was in the first wave of troops to land on Omaha Beach. He was the sole survivor from his unit. His company was captured in the Battle of the Bulge, and was massacred when German guards opened fire on 90 prisoners.
He was among the few who survived.
But the defining moment of the war for Durning was a life-and-death encounter with a young German soldier. Here is how he tells it:
“I was crossing a field somewhere in Belgium. A German soldier ran toward me carrying a bayonet. He couldn’t have been more than 14 or 15. I didn’t see a soldier. I saw a boy. Even though he was coming at me, I couldn’t shoot.”
They fought, and Durning was stabbed seven or eight times. Finally he picked up a rock and bludgeoned the boy to death. Then he held the boy in his arms and wept.
After the war Durning was hospitalized for months for psychological trauma, and in his own words, “dropped into a void for almost a decade” until he discovered acting as an outlet.
He applied to study at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York, but was dismissed after a year. He recalled, “They basically said you have no talent and you couldn’t even buy a dime’s worth of it if it was for sale.”
In 2008 the Screen Actors Guild honored Durning with its Lifetime Achievement Award.
Durning confessed that the memory of killing that German boy continued to haunt him to the end of his life.
“There are many secrets in us, in the depths of our souls, that we don’t want anyone to know about,” he said. “There’s terror and repulsion in us, the terrible spot that we don’t talk about. That place that no one knows about – horrifying things we keep secret. A lot of that is released through acting.”
Or, he might have added, through living.
To some extent, all lives are unfinished, incomplete. Even after death, the end of the story is still being written, because our actions in life ripple like a pebble dropped into a pond.
Charles Durning will never know how many people continue to gain pleasure from watching his movies.
Dag Hammarskjold wrote:
“It is the attention given to the last steps before the summit which decides the value of all that went before.”
The problem is, we don’t know when we will reach the summit, because with each step, it seems to recede before us. All we can do is keep on climbing.
Just a thought…
Joe Nagy
And here are two more musical selections for the ages. Enjoy!
“On the Road Again,” written and recorded here by Willie Nelson, selected by Dick Carter.
“Into the Mystic,” by Van Morrison, selected by Geoff Nixon.