Sweet and Sour Defeat

Stories told of great men and women are like fairy tales wrapped in the petals of a morning flower. When the flower blossoms, hope grows. A child is inspired, and almost everyone understands: A greatness to be, has been. Yet, nothing is ever told as it was. No one's life is ever explained in its entirety. The doubt, the hate, the hunger, and the loneliness are skipped like they never belonged to great people, as though they corrupt the hope of greatness.

John's life work tells you everything about him. It tells you why he fell in love with poetry and math. It tells you why he danced, sang, and grew happy only in his mind. It explains why he both hated and loved the story of Icarus. The story that was told to young men and women to warn them of the dangers of dreaming too big. The dangers of dreaming beyond the equator of everyone's accepted reality.

My commentary on John's life work starts with the things he loved most. He was the type of man who could sit alone for hours and whisper his imaginations out loud. The dark mysteries of the cosmos, veiled in its little white dots, fascinated him beyond measure. The same way a mother smiled when she looked down at her newborn, he smiled when he looked up at the stars. He humbly understood that, before everything, there was nothing. He enjoyed music like a drunk enjoys his palm wine. Every sip of song he consumed made him want more. John wasn't a good man, but he wasn't a bad one either. He loved what he loved and hated what he hated.

I will not bore you with a critique of his great moments. Rather, I will dwell in his defeats. I will demonstrate that if you did not know him to be as great as he was, his life would be nothing more than another "Icarusian" tale: a tale of hope with a dreadful ending.

Three main defeats shaped his greatness and transformed him into the man that he was before his death.

His first defeat came in his youth. He hungered to be the youngest and best at everything he did. He was intelligent enough to understand that perfection wasn't something you sought after. However, he hoped that his hard work would remedy his imperfections. So he worked hard and turned a stone into copper. A copper into silver. A silver into an impure diamond. And then, he did no more. He was never able to make gold. He was always the second-best at the things he wanted most. It took him 25 years to finally learn to appreciate his small victories and a billion years to realize his dreams were just too big and too vast for him. He had the arrogance of a youth who forgot to learn his own limits, and his first defeat came from this arrogance.

His next defeat followed from a pursuit of romantic love. His failure was almost as inevitable as a sunrise. How could a man like him learn to love a woman? How could someone who lived in his own mind learn to satisfy the needs of a woman? The people who knew him either loved him for being too kind and empathetic or were scared of him for being difficult to predict. He lived in his mind for so long that his interactions felt too rehearsed to some and too honest to others. In his brutal journey to find the other half of his heart, he brought that baggage with him. He couldn't play the game of courtship even if he was handed the best cards. In fact, he chose not to play the game when he had his best card. Some called his defeat from love mysterious and insatiable. I call it a display of his cowardice to true commitment.

His final defeat came with his obsession. His obsession poured like sweet honey on a slice of warm bread and hardened soon after, making it rough in the mouth and difficult to swallow without a cup of water. Remember how he never made gold? It wasn't because he couldn't extend his limits any further. It was because he was obsessed with dreaming. His focus dwindled over the years with a bountiful, over-stimulating environment, and his obsession grew stronger at every turn. Every small defeat crushed his soul. So he blamed his own mind. He blamed everything and everyone but his obsession with dreams. If a comet had fallen to the earth, he would have blamed it too. His reality was more brutal than his dreams. He never focused on the world and remained obsessed with his dreams.

So now you understand him the way I do. You can now interpret his life's work the way I do. And you must be as graceful as I have.