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Scott Simon's Essays
Remembering George Harrison and John Knowles
Dec. 1, 2001 -- After hearing that George Harrison had died yesterday, I worked through the day with Beatles songs playing in my office. Quite a few people around the world probably spent a good part of the day listening to The Beatles in their cars, cubicles or kitchens. Past the "I Want to Hold Your Hand" stage of their fame, I've always had a hard time hearing Beatles music called innocent. Sweet, certainly, but rarely simple, kind but cunning. In fact, you might see George Harrison's enthusiasm for Eastern philosophies and his creation of the first relief concerts to fight famine in Bangladesh as an informed and mature effort to make us less innocent about the world we make.
John Knowles died on the same day as George Harrison. The news was understandably overlooked. John Knowles was 75 and, like George Harrison, he earned wealth and fame early. His 1960 book "A Separate Peace" is not only a classic, but like Beatles songs, a perennial best-seller, especially among young students. It's the story of the friendship between two boarding school boys, Gene and Phineas, set in the early years of World War II, when boys were pushing pins into Pearl Harbor and El Alamein on classroom maps. They hoped to see something of the war and world spread across their walls and their lives, and they are a little scared of all that, too.
One day Gene and Finny climb a tree. Phineas falls down and later, on a maddeningly ordinary day, he will die. Gene fears that a jiggle he gave to the tree limb on which they were sitting was unconsciously intended to bring down his more popular friend--to bounce him out of his life. He cannot bring himself to cry at his friend's funeral because it feels like his own. Gene doesn't feel that he's worth the tears.
Past the age of six or so, we are rarely innocent. On the contrary, we run and look around and fall down. We discover ourselves as much as the wider world. We can do great things to win love and some terrible things, too. The day we can see the mistakes of our parents' generation in ourselves, we are no longer kids.
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