Some Heroes

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| April 2008There are some topics I save up because they'll be so much fun to
write about. This is one of them: a list of my heroes.I'm not claiming this is a list of the n most admirable people.
Who could make such a list, even if they wanted to?Einstein isn't on the list, for example, even though he probably
deserves to be on any shortlist of admirable people. I once asked
a physicist friend if Einstein was really as smart as his fame
implies, and she said that yes, he was. So why isn't he on the
list? Because I had to ask. This is a list of people who've
influenced me, not people who would have if I understood their work.My test was to think of someone and ask "is this person my
hero?" It often returned surprising answers. For example,
it returned false for Montaigne, who was arguably the inventor of
the essay. Why? When I thought
about what it meant to call someone a hero, it meant I'd decide what
to do by asking what they'd do in the same situation. That's a
stricter standard than admiration.After I made the list, I looked to see if there was a pattern, and
there was, a very clear one. Everyone on the list had two qualities:
they cared almost excessively about their work, and they were
absolutely honest. By honest I don't mean trustworthy so much as
that they never pander: they never say or do something because
that's what the audience wants. They are all fundamentally subversive
for this reason, though they conceal it to varying degrees.
Jack LambertI grew up in Pittsburgh in the 1970s. Unless you were there it's
hard to imagine how that town felt about the Steelers. Locally,
all the news was bad. The steel industry was dying. But the
Steelers were the best team in football — and moreover, in a
way that seemed to reflect the personality of the city. They didn't
do anything fancy. They just got the job done.Other players were more famous: Terry Bradshaw, Franco Harris, Lynn
Swann. But they played offense, and you always get more attention
for that. It seemed to me as a twelve year old football expert
that the best of them all was
Jack Lambert. And what made him so
good was that he was utterly relentless. He didn't just care about
playing well; he cared almost too much. He seemed to regard it as
a personal insult when someone from the other team had possession
of the ball on his side of the line of scrimmage.The suburbs of Pittsburgh in the 1970s were a pretty dull place.
School was boring. All the adults around were bored with their
jobs working for big companies. Everything that came to us through
the mass media was (a) blandly uniform and (b) produced elsewhere.
Jack Lambert was the exception. He was like nothing else I'd seen.
Kenneth ClarkKenneth Clark is the best nonfiction writer I know of, on any
subject. Most people who write about art history don't really like
art; you can tell from a thousand little signs. But Clark did, and
not just intellectually, but the way one anticipates a delicious
dinner.What really makes him stand out, though, is the quality of his
ideas. His style is deceptively casual, but there is more in
his books than in a library
of art monographs. Reading
The Nude is like a ride in a
Ferrari. Just as you're getting settled, you're slammed back in
your seat by the acceleration. Before you can adjust, you're thrown
sideways as the car screeches into the first turn. His brain throws
off ideas almost too fast to grasp them. Finally at the end of the
chapter you come to a halt, with your eyes wide and a big smile on
your face.Kenneth Clark was a star in his day, thanks to the documentary
series
Civilisation. And if you read only one book about
art history,
Civilisation is the one I'd recommend. It's
much better than the drab Sears Catalogs of art that undergraduates
are forced to buy for Art History 101.
Larry MihalkoA lot of people have a great teacher at some point in their childhood.
Larry Mihalko was mine. When I look back it's like there's a line
drawn between third and fourth grade. After Mr. Mihalko, everything
was different.Why? First of all, he was intellectually curious. I had a few
other teachers who were smart, but I wouldn't describe them as
intellectually curious. In retrospect, he was out of place as an
elementary school teacher, and I think he knew it. That must have
been hard for him, but it was wonderful for us, his students. His
class was a constant adventure. I used to like going to school
every day.The other thing that made him different was that he liked us. Kids
are good at telling that. The other teachers were at best benevolently
indifferent. But Mr. Mihalko seemed like he actually wanted to
be our friend. On the last day of fourth grade, he got out one of
the heavy school record players and played James Taylor's "You've
Got a Friend" to us. Just call out my name, and you know wherever
I am, I'll come running. He died at 59 of lung cancer. I've never
cried like I cried at his funeral.
LeonardoOne of the things I've learned about making things that I didn't
realize when I was a kid is that much of the best stuff isn't made
for audiences, but for oneself. You see paintings and drawings in
museums and imagine they were made for you to look at. Actually a
lot of the best ones were made as a way of exploring the world, not
as a way to please other people. The best of these explorations
are sometimes more pleasing than stuff made explicitly to please.Leonardo did a lot of things. One of his most admirable qualities
was that he did so many different things that were admirable. What
people know of him now is his paintings and his more flamboyant
inventions, like flying machines. That makes him seem like some
kind of dreamer who sketched artists' conceptions of rocket ships
on the side. In fact he made a large number of far more practical
technical discoveries. He was as good an engineer as a painter.His most impressive work, to me, is his
drawings. They're clearly
made more as a way of studying the world than producing something
beautiful. And yet they can hold their own with any work of art
ever made. No one else, before or since, was that good when no one
was looking.
Robert MorrisRobert Morris has a very unusual quality: he's never wrong. It
might seem this would require you to be omniscient, but actually
it's surprisingly easy. Don't say anything unless you're fairly
sure of it. If you're not omniscient, you just don't end up saying
much.More precisely, the trick is to pay careful attention to how you
qualify what you say. By using this trick, Robert has, as far as
I know, managed to be mistaken only once, and that was when he was
an undergrad. When the Mac came out, he said that little desktop
computers would never be suitable for real hacking.It's wrong to call it a trick in his case, though. If it were a
conscious trick, he would have slipped in a moment of excitement.
With Robert this quality is wired-in. He has an almost superhuman
integrity. He's not just generally correct, but also correct about
how correct he is.You'd think it would be such a great thing never to be wrong that
everyone would do this. It doesn't seem like that much extra work
to pay as much attention to the error on an idea as to the idea
itself. And yet practically no one does. I know how hard it is,
because since meeting Robert I've tried to do in software what he
seems to do in hardware.
P. G. WodehousePeople are finally starting to admit that Wodehouse was a great
writer. If you want to be thought a great novelist in your own
time, you have to sound intellectual. If what you write is popular,
or entertaining, or funny, you're ipso facto suspect. That makes

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