There is little more on this blue and green and dusty-fragile planet that I hold with more reverence than the words of John F. Burns. He is practically a religion to me. I’ve collected his text like an apostle stitching gospels together. I have wept more often than I’d like to admit, holding New York newsprint in my hands as he typed basic humanity into his datelines from places that made no sense. He is one of the most important writers of our time.
His retirement was announced late last month, and the paper gave him a proper lauding and send-off, with a touching review of his impact and links to his amazing archive. Outlets all over noted his importance; his poetry.
That his final news article was an account of the burial of Richard III was lost on no one who’s read Shakespeare, or has followed power, or both. HIs last two paragraphs:
Some saw the message encoded in the public acclaim less as one of embracing the idea of Richard as a “good king,” as he has been described by Phil Stone, chairman of the Richard III Society, than one of redemption beyond the grave, a theme that has had a compelling force, across all ages and religions.
That theme was pervasive in the reburial service, perhaps captured best when Archbishop Welby, standing beside the grave as the coffin was lowered, invoked forgiveness for Richard. “We have entrusted our brother Richard to God’s mercy,” he said, “and we now commit his human remains to the ground, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.”
But in addition to his normal reporter capacity to file stories while we slept, Burns was always able to come back later, after thinking a while, and synthesize things. To make you see, whether or not you knew you wanted to, whether horrible or beautiful or both, what we can best glean from the facts he discovered.
And so it was today that I got an ink-joy delivered to my doorstep— a John F. Burns piece in the op-ed page: The Things I Carried Back. He writes that “what those years bred in me, more than anything else, was an abiding revulsion for ideology, in all its guises.” And we must all excise our ideologies. His last paragraph:
My catalog of such moments in the grim dictatorships of the world could fill a book, or three. But coming home to the countries of the West, where nobody dies for a moment’s lapse in fealty to a prime minister or a president, it can be depressing beyond words to hear the loyalists of a given political creed — whether of the left or the right — adopt the unyielding certainties common in totalitarian states. Our rights to think and speak freely have been won at great cost, and we abuse them at our peril.
I spend a lot of my waking moments building and protecting my integrity. I do this consciously, with John F. Burns in my mind, like I’m building an automatic movie of my life that knows everything, and puts false notes in the trailer. One day I want to be able to write a paragraph like that with the authority he musters w/o effort.
I can also be a vociferous person. A partisan Catholic, a defender of Chicago, a political bulldog, an intense lover of who’s mine. I vow, however. to watch my unyielding certainties, and keep them checked with free speech; my own. If you are reading this right now, and we know each other, or ever will, I invite you to hold me to this.