'The Most Chimerical of Hopes'

“Feeling admiration for someone is a privilege that becomes a calamity when the person we admire dies.” With age, such calamities proliferate. We start accumulating meaningful deaths. I don’t recall many, except JFK’s, having much impact on me when I was a kid. One measure of maturity may be periodically adding to the list of those we admire, whose departure leaves us sad or grieving. Someone too cool or sophisticated to have heroes, and thus never to feel their loss, has missed one of life’s rare privileges. The admission above was written by the Spanish novelist Javier Marias in the Winter 2020 issue of The Threepenny Review. In “The Distant Dead(1994)” he writes: “As if it were not enough to have those closest to us die—a list that grows longer with the passing years—there’s the additional sadness of losing people we’ve never seen, with whom we’ve never talked or shared a joke, and whom we cannot, therefore, miss. And yet when we learn that such people have ceased to exist, or have…