Norman Cousins - Humanist And Hero - His Words For Today

I was a immature woman, and definitely in awe but not nervous on my manner to ran into him for the first time. Writers were Gods to me. Superhuman. Something I could never do, or be. And he was a author summoned by presidents, Joseph Pulitzer Prize winners, physicists, popes, and kings.

As the editor-in-chief of Saturday Reappraisal Jessye Norman Cousins believed that in modern times of crisis, authors could be fonts of ideas. They could raise the human race in new ways. During the Cold War he'd been an unofficial go-between for President Kennedy, Nikita Khrushchev and the pope.

He said that he wanted to foster the written word, and his ain words were nurturing. His "Human Options" opened my eyes to the Negro spiritual military units behind his friends like Prince Albert Schweitzer, Margaret Bourke White, JFK, and Billy Graham Greene.

He said that decease was not the cardinal loss in life; only the known one, the certain one. What was the racking death, the preventable death, was the decease of positive emotions while we were still alive: hope, faith, love, purpose, spirit, determination, festivity.

He was a cardinal invitee at the famed White Person Person House Alfred Nobel Prize dinner on April 29, 1962; exchanging bon mots with Lionel Trilling, Jesse James Baldwin, Dr. Linus Pauling, William Styron, Henry Martin Robert Frost, Pearl Vaulting Horse and other leading visible lights that President Jack Kennedy termed "The most extraordinary aggregation of endowment and human cognition that ever gathered in the White House, except when Seth Thomas Thomas Jefferson dined alone."

Political journalist, professor, human race peace advocate, passionate atomic disarming crusader, humanist, author, husband, father to five daughters, victor of awards and awards from around the world. I thought of what added lustre to his name as my heels clicked down that long, bright, empty hallway on the UCLA campus where a edifice now bears his name; and recalled that Prince Albert Einstein, Time Magazine's Man of the 20th Century, would name to confabulate with him on the phone. I was a dust atom in comparison, and had also met some of the literati who were disappointing. Would another hero bite the dust today?

His door was open, "Come in! Come in!" Jessye Norman Cousins was sitting on the border of his desk as if he didn't have got a attention in the world, or a thing to do. A knee joint crossed over the other leg, one manus was in the other in his lap. His look was one of kindness and intelligence. He had lit up fresh skin, and a warm smile. He wore a simple tweed jacket, slacks, loafers, no necktie with his shirt unfastened at the collar. He personified saving grace and ease.

Our work had a bantam connection, and so I got to cognize him a bit, beyond his public stature, lectures, and books. He believed in laughter, optimism, and had a scintillation in his oculus for the world. He was so funny about the interrelatednesses between all things, and in the last twelve old age of his life, especially the mind-body-disease connection.

He said that "Inevitably, an individual is measured by his or her biggest concerns." But he is also measured by his composure whether in the hallways of power, in a lazar colony, in dealing with his ain long conflict with degenerative disease, or in his generousness to a immature adult female who could make absolutely nil for him in return.

The last clip I saw him I was in a parking batch at the end of a busy twenty-four hours laughing with a grouping of friends. He and his married woman drove by in his aged bluish Volvo. He saw me and slowed down with a large smiling to moving ridge goodbye. One of the truly great men, whose words challenge us to convey forth the greatness of humanity, within and without, today.