I can’t pass a cemetery without thinking that we should move on from headstones and monuments and leave behind short accounts of our lives. I suspect there are lessons to be learned in those stories.
One of the lessons I learned in college came from a history professor who was interested in demographics. While teaching us to mine statistical data from old records, he made us read primary sources. In studying the 17th century, I read hundreds of pages of diaries, letters and reports.
I was surprised, in my journey through the Age of Enlightenment, to read about the terror of epidemics with little thought about prevention. Ordinary people didn’t worry about germs because they didn’t know about them. I was surprised that people with university degrees worried about witches.
You can get at the facts of history — the names of the kings and queens and the dates of the battles — relatively easily. The hard part is grasping what people were thinking.
Getting an appreciation of how people of an earlier age thought is hard. It’s baffling to look back at how we Americans thought about slavery and segregation. That inability to see the past clearly haunts us today as we think about race.
Those primary sources are invaluable, and my friend Michael Vita, 84, reminded me that oral histories should be included in those records.
He recorded an interview with the Stonewall National Museum that shows what the life of a gay man who grew up the ’50s and ’60s was like. You can listen to the interview to find out what it was like to grow up in New York, what it was like to perform on Broadway, what it was like to have friends die of AIDS.
I was interested in how Michael overcame the brutal teachings of religious people. In my mind, Michael compiled his own scriptures — writings that mean something to him. He says he tries to live by two sayings:
Life can only be understood backward but must be lived forward.
Retirement is leaving the sphere of accomplishment and entering the sphere of appreciation and enjoyment while living in the wonder of it all.
The first is from Soren Kierkegaard, and the second he attributes to Joseph Campbell.
The interview is a good portrait of my friend. I’m glad it’s there and that a museum has decided to preserve it. I wish we had a museum or archive that served as a repository for all such records — a kind of National Portrait Gallery, with “portraits” conceived broadly.
If I get my wish, and someone builds one, I hope you’re ready. Are you working on your own portrait?
• Source: You can find the interview with Michael Vita here:
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