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Phantom of the Opera

Phantom of the Opera

by | Nov 4, 2022 | 0 comments

Phantom of the Opera

Gaston Leroux published his novel, “Le Fantome de l’Opera,” or “Phantom of the Opera,” in 1911.

Earlier he had worked as a theatre critic for a French newspaper, the “L’Echo de Paris,” and had heard talk of a chandelier, fastened above the crowd, in the Paris Opera House, that had crashed down, killing one, injuring others. He also learned of murders and kidnappings at the theatre.

He then heard rumors of a ghost that haunted the Paris Opera House, who lived near an underground lake, deep below the opera house, who in secret, interacted with audiences, theatre officials, and actors.

Leroux pulled these isolated facts and rumors into a tale of mystery and horror, in the same order as Edgar Allen Poe or Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. In Leroux’s telling, the Opera Ghost instructs those with mediocre talents and brings out their best on stage, if they will allow him.

The Opera Ghost hesitates to show himself to many, because he suffers from a disfigured face, that he covers with a partial mask.

One current literary critic, Patricia Drumright, pointed out that Leroux’s story has remained popular for over a hundred years, because it offers “something for just about everyone,” mystery, Gothic horror, music, theater, melodrama, tragedy, and, above all else, romance.

In his mystery novel’s prologue, Leroux claimed that he had investigated the facts and rumors and concluded that it was all true, even though his novel is a work of fiction.

The romance is three-sided: Christine Daae, a young and dazzling soprano, from Sweden; Rauol, Christine’s childhood friend, who now professes his intense love for Christine; and the Opera Ghost, whom Christine calls her Angel of Music, who also professes his everlasting love for Christine.

Drumright says, “Rauol offers romance, but the Phantom offers passion.”

In Leroux’s beginning pages, Christine sings in place of Carlotta, who had failed to show for a performance, and Christine brings down the house. The audience is astonished at Christine’s voice, her exceptional talent, and wonders why she has not sung before.

Seated in the audience that evening is Rauol, a young man who recognizes Christine as a childhood friend. After the performance, he goes to her backstage room and is about to knock on the door, when he hears a conversation between Christine and a man, both inside the room.

The man says, “Christine, you must love!” She replies, “How can you talk like that? When I sing only for you!” He says, “Your soul is a beautiful thing, child. The angels wept tonight.”

Christine leaves the room, fails to see Rauol, who then steps into the room, wanting to meet and confront this mysterious man, whom he now despises, but the room is empty. When Rauol confronts Christine about the man in her room, she is vague, evasive, not forthcoming with information.

Gothic horror novels are “expected to be dark and tempestuous and full of ghosts, madness, outrage, superstition, and revenge.” Drumright says, “this tale contrasts ugliness with elegance, genius with madness, and ruthlessness with compassion.”

In 1984, Andrew Lloyd Weber, a Broadway musical producer, famed for “Cats,” was busy writing a different musical, when he found a copy of Leroux’s long-out-of-print novel in a second-hand store.

Lloyd Weber said, “I realized that the reason I was hung up was because I was trying to write a romantic story. With the Phantom, it was there.” The musical producer transformed Leroux’s novel into a spectacular musical extravaganza.

Drumright says that Andrew Lloyd Weber’s stage version of Leroux’s novel is now considered “the most successful musical of all time.”

But, “Phantom of the Opera,” Broadway’s longest-running show ever, after 35 years, will close on February 18, 2023, with a record 13,925 performances. “It has sold nearly 20 million tickets and grossed $1.3 billion.” “This winter the Phantom will haunt the Paris Opera house for the last time.”

I will say that Andrew Lloyd Weber’s music is haunting. The “Overture” features a pipe organ solo with crashing chords that step up the musical scale and then step back down. Think Vincent Price and Edgar Allen Poe. The two most admired songs are “All I Ask of You,” and “Music of the Night.”

In that latter song, the masked Phantom sings his love to Christine.

“Nighttime sharpens, heightens each sensation. Darkness stirs and wakes imagination. Silently the senses abandon their defenses. . . . Let the dream begin, let your darker side give in, To the power of the music that I write. The power of the music of the night.” It is haunting.

Of Leroux’s novel, one critic pointed out that it is a story of “a misunderstood monster who only needs love,” a nod to “Beauty and the Beast.” Another said of the Phantom, “He had a heart that could have held the entire empire of the world; and in the end, he had to content himself with a cellar.”

Have a safe and happy—if not a Phantom-filled—Halloween! “Let the dream begin.”

Tact

by | Nov 4, 2022 | 0 comments

Tact

News broke early this month that school officials at New York University fired an adjunct organic chemistry professor named Dr. Maitland Jones, after 82 of his class of 350 students signed a petition, that charged Jones with making the class too hard. The mean grade on one midterm was 30%.

In their petition, the students did not ask school officials to terminate Jones’s employment, but just to address his degree of difficulty when grading.

Jones is eighty-four years old, and was a well-respected and long-time professor at Princeton, where he wrote 225 academic papers, plus the 1300-page textbook, “Organic Chemistry.”

In his defense he said that the students, “weren’t coming to class; that’s for sure. They weren’t watching the videos, and they weren’t able to answer the questions. Students were misreading exam questions at an astonishing rate.”

Some sided with Jones, saying that organic chemistry is, by its nature, hard, “that it has a mythical status as one of the most difficult classes in undergrad science education, and that it serves as a filter or a gatekeeper to determine which students get into medical school,” and which do not.

Another chemistry professor at NYU, Paramjit Arora, said, “[Jones] learned to teach during a time when the goal was to teach at a very high and rigorous level. We hope that students will see that putting them through that rigor is doing them good.”

To succeed at organic chemistry, a student must learn “to mix memorization and problem-solving. She or he must commit to memory dozens of flow charts, as each type of reaction will need different conditions and catalysts depending on the precise nature of the starting materials.”

Once a student has jammed the flowcharts into his or her memory banks, she or he can then solve problems, “which combinations of reactions will build simple raw materials into a complex chemical, like an antibiotic or a polymer.”

John Beckman, NYU official said, that the school was justified in terminating Jones, because “his course evaluation scores were the worst of any undergraduate science courses, and multiple student complaints about his dismissiveness, unresponsiveness, condescension, and opacity about grading.”

Was Dr. Maitland Jones too hard? Or were the students unprepared for a course of this difficulty, or were they failing to work hard to the level required? The truth lies somewhere in between.

This past weekend I attended my fifty-year high school class reunion. I listened to numerous stories of my fellow students’ lives: where they lived now, what educations they attained, what careers they completed, and what families they created.

One friend explained that in the 1970s, he was studying music at the University of Northern Colorado, when his Music Theory professor suggested that he should drop the course, that he had an “F” now, that it would not improve much, and that he should drop Music and study Speech instead.

So my friend said he stopped studying Music one day, and began to study Radio and Television production in the Speech and Communications department the next. After graduation he worked at a station in Denver, producing television shows. He enjoyed it, but he still longed to play music.

He began playing classic rock on his guitar evenings wherever asked, and was soon making more money than he did at his day job. At one point he grew tired of playing a prescribed set of songs, and began to request songs from his audiences, for fun, too keep him sharp and ready.

He said, “that decision saved my career. If no one in the audience mentioned a song, I would just stand there, on stage, with guitar in hand, and wait until someone did.” His audiences dictated his performances, what he played, what he sang.

I find my friend’s story most interesting. His level of knowledge of playing and singing classic rock guitar songs was so deep that whatever the audience tossed at him, he could play it, in an instant, with little thought. Because he had memorized hundreds of flowcharts, his confidence soared.

Columbus’s “Nina” and “Pinta” were caravels, ships with lateen or triangular-shaped sails, that allowed them to tact, that is to “sail in a forward zig-zag direction against a headwind.” In other words, moving sideways, at an angle, the ship could make forward progress into a headwind.

To master any body of knowledge—albeit chemistry or music—requires a trained mind, the ability to imagine files and rows and cells on a spreadsheet, a series of flowcharts, or an entire wall of pigeon-holes, and in each cell or pigeon hole lies an incredible amount of data, available to withdraw and use.

In life, we sometimes have a tailwind, and we soar. Other times a crosswind, like Music Theory or Organic Chemistry, flips us over. Yet, sometimes we face worse, a ferocious headwind, and it is then that we learn to tact, at a forty-five degree angle, in a zig-zag style, making slow progress forward.

‘On Writing’ and ‘Why I Write’

‘On Writing’ and ‘Why I Write’

by | Oct 5, 2022 | 0 comments

‘On Writing’ and ‘Why I Write’

In the year 2000, the horror fiction writer Stephen King came out with a different kind of book, a nonfiction book that he entitled, “On Writing: a Memoir of the Craft.” He begins with a series of scenes from his childhood, and explains how he launched his career of writing popular fiction.

King uses a metaphor, that of a toolbox, to describe how he works when he writes. At the bottom of the toolbox lie the fundamentals: appropriate vocabulary, sticking with accepted grammar, the use of active verbs rather than passive, and avoiding adverbs.

The toolbox’s second layer contains distinct styles: light, thin, and airy fluff; or serious and detailed information. Often the reading audience determines an appropriate style. King points out that dense and packed paragraphs are for scholars, but thin, underweighted paragraphs make reading easier.

King offers an opinion. “The paragraph, not the sentence, is the basic unit of writing.” In other words, he urges writers to write a functional paragraph—one with a topic sentence and a number of supporting sentences—rather than a series of sentences strung together without reason.

Winston Churchill once glared at a dessert, and shouted, “Take away this pudding. It has no theme.”

The toolbox’s third and top layer contains wisdom and good judgment; in other words, selecting the right tool for the job. A hammer will nail down a screw, but a screwdriver works better.

For example, leave out humor, satire, and ridicule when describing a crime or battle scene, and steer clear of a hostile, strident, or even angry tone. Leave that for the zealots and demagogues.

Stephen King advises all want-to-be writers to “Read a lot, and write a lot.” He says to read all kinds, good or even excellent written works, as well as mediocre and rotten, just to gain the experience of knowing what sparkles and what shines dim.

He says that he “reads seventy to eighty books every year, mostly fiction.” Because he writes for several hours every morning, he reads every afternoon.

King remains infatuated with Strunk and White’s small text of 78 pages, “The Elements of Style,” a standard for College Freshman composition classes. Although some writers have jettisoned this classic work, King believes that the list of 21 suggestions at the book’s end points writers in a good direction.

“1. Place yourself in the background. 2. Write in a way that comes naturally. 3. Work from a suitable design. 4. Write with nouns and verbs. 5. Revise and rewrite. 6. Do not overwrite. 7. Do not overstate. And, 21. Prefer the standard to the offbeat. ie. Steer clear of the eccentricities in language.”

Stephen King’s advice to writers holds merit, but not all enjoy his horror fiction. Others may prefer non-fiction: an essay, an opinion column, a history, a memoir, a sketch of an event, or a biography. Yet, King’s tool box remains, for the most part, the same for both fiction and non-fiction writers.

In 1946, a British author named George Orwell wrote an essay that he entitled, “Why I Write.” He gave four reasons: sheer egoism, a desire to seem clever; aesthetic enthusiasm, the beauty in words and phrases; historical impulse, a wish to identify “true facts and store them up for posterity’s use.”

His fourth reason, political purpose, is “a desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other people’s idea of the kind of society that they should strive after.”

Orwell wrote in the mid-twentieth century, a time when the democracies of the world were under attack, when totalitarian governments were on the rise, when the outcome of the conflict was unknown.

He said, “The Spanish war and other events in 1936-7 turned the scale. Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written against totalitarianism and for a democratic” form of government. “It seems nonsense to think that one can avoid writing of such subjects.”

Toward the end of the essay, Orwell underscores Strunk and White’s first suggestion. He writes, “And yet it is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one’s own personality.” In other words, he wants to “place himself in the background.”

Orwell then finishes the essay, with a startling sentence.

“And looking back through my work, I see that it is invariably where I lacked a political purpose that I wrote lifeless books and was betrayed into purple passages, sentences without meaning, decorative adjectives, and humbug generally.”

Orwell believed that he wrote his best pieces when he wrote with a political purpose, when he tried, “to push the world in a certain direction, to alter people’s idea about the proper society,” to suggest a better path for a government and its people to follow. Courageous he was.

Although Stephen King wanted to entertain, and George Orwell wanted to change the way people thought about political issues, yet each relied upon tools from similar toolboxes.

One final thought, writing well requires years of diligent effort. Chaucer said, “Not years enough, in life so short, to learn a craft so long.”

Bill Benson, of Sterling, is a dedicated historian.

Recap of Queen Elizabeth II

Recap of Queen Elizabeth II

by | Sep 22, 2022 | 0 comments

Queen Elizabeth II of New Zealand

Queen Elizabeth passed away last week, Thursday, September 8, 2022, at 96. She was born on April 21, 1926, and had one sibling, a younger sister named Margaret, born August 21, 1930.

When ten, Elizabeth discovered she was next in line to inherit England’s throne, whenever her father, King George VI, would pass away. Eight-year-old Margaret asked Elizabeth, “Does this mean you have to be the next Queen?” Elizabeth replied, “Someday.” Margaret said, “Poor you.”

When a child, Elizabeth understood that her life was mapped out in front of her.

On November 20, 1947, when twenty-one, Elizabeth married Philip, and they had four children: Charles, Anne, Andrew, and Edward.

Her father, King George VI, passed away on February 6, 1952, and that same day her privy and executive councils named her Queen of England. At twenty-five, she ascended to the throne.

Her coronation though did not convene until June 2, 1953, and was held at Westminster Abbey, in London. At Prince Philip’s suggestion, it was televised, and millions across the world watched as the twenty-seven-year girl and mother was crowned Queen of England.

She marked her silver jubilee, after twenty-five years, in 1977; her golden jubilee, after fifty years, in 2002; and her platinum jubilee, after seventy years, on the first weekend in June 2022. She sat on England’s throne for seventy years, 214 days, the longest of any British monarch.

After the Queen passed forty years on the throne, she gave a remarkable speech on November 24, 1992, and said, “1992 is not a year on which I shall look back with undiluted pleasure. It has turned out to be an ‘Annus Horribilis.’” a Latin phrase meaning a “horrible year.” What was going on?

On Friday, November 20, 1992, a tragic fire broke out in Windsor Castle, her main residence, and destroyed 115 rooms. The fire had started when a spotlight had pressed against a curtain.

Beyond that, and more at home, in 1992, three of her oldest children’s marriages were unravelling: Charles and Diana, Anne and Mark Phillips, and Andrew and Sarah Ferguson.

Charles and Lady Diana had created a series of scandals that year when rumors surfaced that the two were not getting along, due to incompatibility and the twelve years age difference. She said, “He made me feel so inadequate in every possible way. Each time I came up for air, he pushed me down.”

Lady Diana charged Prince Charles with loving Camilla, a former girlfriend, more than herself. In light of Charles and Camilla’s long-term marriage after his and Diana’s 1996 divorce, that accusation may have been true.

Lady Diana said, “There were three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded.”

On December 20, 1995, when the Queen had had enough of the tabloids and scandals, she wrote letters to her son and daughter-in-law, and advised them to divorce. It was finalized August 28, 1996, and a year later, on August 31, 1997, at 36, in a Paris tunnel, in a tragic car crash, Lady Diana died.

The nation wept.

Prince Anne divorced her first husband, Mark Phillips, in 1992; and in early 1992, after six years of marriage, Andrew and Sarah Ferguson legally separated. Their divorce was final four years later.

Further into that speech on November 24, 1992, the Queen said, “Criticism is good for people, but we are all part of the same fabric of our national society, and that scrutiny can be just as effective if it is made with a touch of gentleness, good humor, and understanding.”

A disgusting event occurred a decade before. At 7:15 a.m., on July 9, 1982, Michael Fagan, an Englishman with a checkered past, crawled over a wall at Buckingham Palace, climbed up a drainpipe, entered the Queen’s bedroom, and woke the Queen. Security arrived soon to escort Fagan out the door.

Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, passed away on April 9, 2021, at the age of 99, 62 days short of his 100th birthday.

During Elizabeth’s reign, 179 individuals served as her Commonwealth’s prime ministers, in places as far apart as Antigua and Barburda in the Caribbean, to Uganda in east Africa.

There were fifteen United Kingdom prime ministers, beginning with Winston Churchill in 1952, and ending with Liz Truss, the newest, who met the Queen at Balmoral Castle, in Scotland, on September 6, 2022, two days before the Queen’s passing.

Along the way, there was Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair, Theresa May, and Boris Johnson.

The Queen knighted twenty seven Americans during her seventy-year rein, including: Bill and Melinda Gates, Angelina Jolie, Ralph Lauren, Steven Spielberg, Michael Bloomberg, George H. W. Bush, Ronald Reagan, Rudy Giuliani, Alan Greenspan, and Billy Graham.

Three world famous Englishmen also received that designation: Elton John, Mick Jagger, and Paul McCartney. That is why the former Beatle, in all due respect, is called Sir Paul McCartney.

A trivia question, “Queen Elizabeth’s last name?” Windsor, perhaps named after the castle.

Vaclav Smil

by | Aug 29, 2022 | 0 comments

Vaclav Smil

Vaclav Smil was born in 1943, during World War II, in Czechoslovakia, in the German Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. As a teenager, Smil’s parents expected him to chop wood, every four hours, to keep the fires burning in the house’s three stoves, “one downstairs and two up.”

One writer suspected that Smil may have thought then that “this is hardly an efficient way to live.”

A bright student, with a strong work ethic, Smil left his small hometown in the Bohemian forest and made his way to Charles University, in Prague, the capital, where he studied natural sciences, “35 classes a week, 10 months a year, for 5 years.” And I thought I studied hard at college.

Smil married his wife Eva, and then in 1969, after she completed a medical degree, and after Soviet troops invaded Czechoslovakia, the couple fled to the United States. Two years later, Smil received a doctorate in Geography at Pennsylvania State University, in State College, Pennsylvania.

He took a job teaching small classes of students environmental science—global energy, populations, material production, trade, food, and policy—at the University of Manitoba, in Winnipeg, Canada.

For the final of his introductory environmental science class, he gave his students 10 multiple choice questions. Each question offered the same options: none of the answers may be correct; they all may be correct; or one, two, or three may be correct. A student had to decide.

After fifty years, Vaclav and Eva Smil still live in Winnipeg, where Smil is now Professor Emeritus.

Over the decades, Smil has written countless numbers of articles, plus almost fifty books. The first, in 1976, he entitled China’s Energy: Achievements, Problems, Prospects, and the most recent, in 2022, How the World Really Works: The Science Behind How We Got Here and Where We’re Going.

Each of his books are short, but filled with pages of endnotes. He sells only a few thousand copies. Yet, among the wiser sorts, Smil’s books have established his reputation as a piercing intellectual.

Elizabeth Wilson at Dartmouth, said of Smil, “You could take a paragraph from one of his books and make a whole career out of it. He does a really good job of being nuanced.”

After Bill Gates read, for the first time, one of Smil’s books, he said that he “felt a little beat up.” He wondered, “Am I ever going to be able to understand all of this?”

In the introduction to his latest book, Smil comments upon his need to see a big picture, as opposed to diving deep into a specialized nook of learning.

“Drilling the deepest hole and being an unsurpassed master of a tiny sliver of the sky visible from its bottom has never appealed to me. I have always preferred to scan as far and as wide as my limited capabilities have allowed me to do. My main area of interest has been energy studies.”

In the first chapter, Smil makes a “grim announcement that every fundamental aspect of modern civilization rests on fossil fuel combustion.” From the wood of his childhood, he has witnessed the transition to coal, to crude oil, to natural gas.

For example, he points out that the food that each of us eats arrives in our supermarkets, because some unit of carbon product was expended to first produce and then distribute it.

Ever a numbers guy, Smil says that “a humble loaf of sourdough bread requires the equivalent of about 5.5 tablespoons of diesel fuel, a tomato 6 tablespoons.” He then asks, “How many vegans enjoying a salad are aware of its substantial fossil fuel pedigree?”

“In 2020, an average Earthling has every year about 800 kilograms of crude oil, or 1.5 tons of good bituminous coal at her or his disposal.”

Smil is uncertain about renewables. For example, a wind tower. Fossil fuel is expended to build that tower. He says, “Heavy equipment powered by diesel fuel dug its foundation, kilns fired with natural gas baked each dry sack of concrete, and the steel towers were forged with coal.”

“And an electric semi-truck and trailer can now haul about the weight of their batteries.”

He closes that first chapter with a wry observation. “Both the relative high share and the scale of our dependence on fossil carbon make any rapid substitutions impossible. Not a sudden abandonment, nor a rapid demise, but a gradual decline.”

Smil claims that he is neither a pessimist or an optimist, and that his goal is not to forecast. Instead, he “champions uncertainty, insists upon an agnostic view, and displays humility, the rarest earth metal of all.” He admits that “a breakthrough in cheap energy storage would change the game.”

In cold Winnipeg, Vaclav and his wife Eva live in a 2,000 square foot house “stuffed with 50% more insulation into its walls, its windows triple-paned.” He says, “My house is a very efficient machine for living,” different than the three wood-burning stoves of his childhood home.

Bill Russell and Retirement

by | Aug 29, 2022 | 0 comments

Bill Russell and Retirement

Three weeks ago, on July 31, 2022, the former Boston Celtics’ imposing center, Bill Russell, passed away, at age eighty-eight. Over thirteen seasons at Boston, from 1957 to 1969, he collected a total of eleven championship rings, a record never since eclipsed or matched.

When he retired in 1969, he moved to Mercer Island, in Seattle, Washington, and it was there he passed away. For fifty-three years, he enjoyed a well-deserved retirement in the cool Pacific Northwest, although he coached seven seasons in the NBA in the 70s and 80s.

Thirty years ago, today, on August 18, 1992, Larry Bird, another Boston Celtic great, announced his retirement from the NBA.

Michael Jordan, spectacular shooting guard for the Chicago Bulls, retired three times from the NBA. After ten years with the Bulls, he quit before the start of the 1993-1994 season, to play for, of all things, a Minor League baseball team.

Then, in March of 1995, he returned to lead the Bulls to three more NBA championships.

In 1998, Jordan retired a second time from the Bulls, but then in 2001, at age 38, he returned to the NBA, playing for the Washington Wizards for two seasons, before retiring for good in 2003.

Last week, on August 11, Tom Brady, Tampa Bay Buccaneers’ premier quarterback, announced that “he would take a break during training and miss two pre-season games.” Last February, he announced his retirement from the NFL, but then a month later, he thought otherwise and tweeted, “I’m coming back for my 23rd season in Tampa. Unfinished business.”

Like Bill Russell, Tom Brady achieved fame and fortune in Boston, winning six Super Bowls for the New England Patriots, over twenty seasons. For the past two seasons, 2020 and 2021, he has played for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. At 45, he must be the oldest player in the NFL.

Forty-one-year-old Serena Williams announced last week that she is stepping away from tennis, saying, “I’ve been reluctant to admit that I have to move on from playing tennis. Maybe the best word to describe what I’m up to is evolution. I’m evolving away from tennis, toward other things.”

Age catches up with all players, even the superstars, because their bodies cannot perform at the extreme level required to win. Some retire. Some are let go. Some evolve.

One day the boxing champion Sugar Ray Leonard saw floaters in an eye. A doctor diagnosed a detached retina. Sugar Ray cancelled his next fight, had the surgery to repair the retina on May 9, 1982, and on November 9, 1982, announced his permanent retirement from boxing.

Politicians, on the other hand, have a longer runway for their careers than do athletes. Voters and elections force politicians into retirement, or they are termed out and per law cannot run again.

For example, in the presidential election of 1980, Ronald Reagan defeated Jimmy Carter, who, with his wife Rosalyn, returned to their home in Plains, Georgia, where for forty-two years, they have lived a quiet and long retirement.

Born August 18, 1927, Rosalynn Carter turns 95 this year, and Jimmy will turn 98 on October 1.

Bill Clinton served two terms, eight years, as President, and because he could not run a third time, he and Hillary purchased a home north of New York City, at Chappaqua, New York, where they have lived for the past twenty-two years. Clinton marks his seventy-sixth birthday this week, on August 19.

George W. Bush also served two terms, and then he and Laura returned to their home in Texas, where they have lived for fourteen years.

Barack Obama also served two terms, and for the past six years, he and Michelle divide their time between a mansion at Martha’s Vineyard, in Massachusetts, and a home in Washington D.C.

Donald Trump left the White House in January 2021, and returned to his homes, one in New York City and another at Mar-a-Lago in Florida.

One point of all this is that the winners in life—athletes, politicians, or even business owners—can slip anytime, and find themselves outside the game, watching from the stands, while others play the game that they once loved to play. The sword of Damocles hangs over all the stars.

Another point is that retirement can last a long time, often far longer than a person’s working career. For Bill Russell, fifty-three years. For Jimmy Carter, forty-three years.

Yet, some never step aside. Warren Buffett is ninety-one years old, and his business partner, Charlie Munger is ninety-eight years old. Neither are in a hurry to let others assume their positions.

After President Harry Truman fired General Douglas MacArthur during the Korean War, Congress invited the general to speak. He closed his speech to the joint session with an old Army ballad. “Old soldiers never die, they just fade away.” Some do not retire. Some evolve. Some just fade away.