Each year at the end of December World Magazine presents a list of public figures that died that year. The editors used to title it “Man Knows Not His Time” though in 2008 the article was labeled “Departures.” This year the dead ranged in age from 28 year old Australian actor Heath Ledger to the “world’s oldest woman” Edna Parker, age 115. I recognized forty-one of the ninety-two actors, scientists, athletes, politicians, musicians, and other celebrities listed. All of them accomplished something of historical note and received a one paragraph obituary. In the larger scheme of things, few people leave any ripples in the historical consciousness of the world.

Several of these recently passed people had a definite impact on my own life, primarily through their books and inspirational leadership. It is interesting how many diverse people influence us without ever actually meeting.  When I was in high school in the 1960s, William F. Buckley, the editor of National Review, spoke to me like no other journalist of the time and I became a rabid fan for many years. While I disagreed with him on various points, he nonetheless gave me an appreciation for effective vocabulary, witty repartee, and anti-communist zeal during the Cold War. His “Firing Line” program was one of the few things on TV worth watching. I never read Buckley without laughing out loud. He was 82.

Although I wasn’t from North Carolina, I never tired of Republican Senator Jesse Helms tweaking the noses of the politically correct, taking stands in the Senate when no one else would stand with him, and delivering speeches which harkened back to a time when the Constitution was taken seriously by our elected public servants. In every re-election bid his defeat was predicted by the pundits but, like Rocky Balboa, he took all the punishment and was the only one standing in the end. He was the most-hated -by-the-political-left-man in Congress for decades. He was 86.

The third person who has passed and one with whom I spent untold hours in his magisterial written works was the Russian Christian philosopher and cultural critic Alexander Solzhenitsyn. As a historian and novelist, there are few in history who could match his analysis of mankind’s basic problems or his descriptions of the evil of political tyranny. A victim of Stalin’s paranoia, he was incarcerated in the incredibly harsh penal system of Russia and eventually exiled. He lived in the United States for twenty years and was outspoken in his criticism of the West, especially Americans, for their seeming unbridled revel in materialism and cultural decadence. At a graduation address at Harvard in 1978 he stated that the U.S. suffers from a “decline in courage” and “lack of manliness.” Although celebrated and embraced by many conservatives, he was spurned by most American politicians and scorned by the trend-setting elites of intellectual fashion and the mass media. He always hoped for a spiritual renewal of his homeland, and, upon the restoration of his citizenship and returning to Russia after the demise of the Soviet empire, he was hailed as a prophetic favorite son. I consider well-spent, all the time taken to read The Gulag Archipelago, The First Circle, One Day in the Live of Ivan Denisovich, and Cancer Ward. The rising generation probably cannot appreciate his anti-Communism though the wisdom of the Russian sage still resonates on many issues; “the human soul longs for things higher and purer than those offered by today’s mass living habits…by TV stupor and by intolerable music.”He was 89.

Perhaps I’ll meet them all someday.

Bill Potter