Brick walls are there for a reason...

[alexpgp]

I've just spent the better part of the afternoon downloading and watching a file of Dr. Randy Pausch giving a lecture in Carnegie Mellon University's "Journeys" lecture series. The series used to be known, apparently, as the "The Last Lecture," the idea being that this would be the lecture a professor might deliver if said academic had one last opportunity to speak to an audience in a lecture hall before he or she died. All very hypothetical, dontchaknow.

In Dr. Pausch's case, the question is not hypothetical. While he is currently in marvelous physical shape, the tumors in his pancreas and liver will all but certainly kill him within two or three months. As Pausch puts it, he really "nailed the venue" for this lecture.

Paraphrashing Samuel Johnson, when a man knows he will die of cancer in a couple of months, it concentrates his mind wonderfully. That such a man already has a concentrated mind, then, almost makes his lecture seem almost routine in its content and delivery.

And yet, as he finished his lecture, I found myself crying and applauding - involuntarily, in both cases - and while the applause might be explainable in terms of res ipsa loquitur, I am not quite sure of why my eyes were wet.

Is it a way of saying, "Well done!," directed at Pausch? Or are they what I would describe as tears of gratitude, for showing the way?

I don't know, but I feel I have changed.

Cheers...

Comments

[rillifane.livejournal.com]

I also wept.

In part perhaps it is an acknowlegement of the courage and grace of another and the reminder that life, and death, grants no dispensation to the righteous and the brave.

I recall the words of Ecclesiastes.

I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

For man also knoweth not his time: as the fishes that are taken in an evil net, and as the birds that are caught in the snare; so are the sons of men snared in an evil time, when it falleth suddenly upon them.