July 6, 2005

I rose early this morning, as I do most mornings, while the house was quiet and the world hovered in that cool and ivory moment between night and dawn. As usual, I made coffee and stepped across the dewy grass to pick up the morning newspaper. There it was: the announcement. For a span of perhaps twenty minutes, I felt genuine grief and closed tear-filled eyes to shut out the stark black and white lines. One of the few living people I hold as a personal hero had died.

But James Bond Stockdale would have, no doubt, chuckled at me, not just at my tears but also at the emotion of grief itself. And so, I repented of that moment of grief and replaced it with . . . well, I'll get back to that later.

I won't bother repeating the brief biographical sketches posted in newspapers and on websites around the country today. They just don't get it; they have no concept of the real character of the man they are extolling, a man who would have been equally comfortable walking among the quiet columns with Aristotle; serving as a military, political, and philosophical advisor to the Emperor Marcus Aurelius; sitting calmly beside Paul the Apostle as the storm of the Ephesian riots raged; or discussing advanced theoretical math and physics in a classroom in a modern university.

And I think he may have helped save my sanity. His writings (and yes, I have read them all, or at least as many as I have been able to find) helped me put into a more proper perspective my own meager experiences of that deadly serious absurdity called the Vietnam War. That achievement alone would have earned my gratitude and respect. More importantly, he pointed me back to a vital consideration which I only half understood and which I, foolishly, had not placed in the forefront of my life: Faith.

He taught by personal example and by action: praxis, facta non verba, no B.S. His writings, and the works of other writers he recommended, helped me step away from a world wallowing in self-pity and worshipping the status of victim and into a new world, what he once called the "World of Epictetus" (and yes, I have also read all the available works attributed to Epictetus).

This is not the occasion to explain the history or tenets of stoicism. I would summarize Stockdale's version of it as simply believing that whatever intelligence created all things seems to know what it is doing, so whatever petty things are happening in my life are never without purpose. I am not the issue. My task is to do (at all times, in all circumstances, at whatever personal cost, under all conditions of plenty, poverty, success or failure) the RIGHT thing. It is a simple idea that the wisest of men have always taught. Lincoln, for instance, closed his famous Cooper Institute speech with the same idea: "Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith, let us dare to do our duty as we understand it."

In that faith, James Bond Stockdale did his duty, remaining defiant against extreme physical, mental, and emotional torture. He refused to accept the role of victim and refused to wallow in self-pity. He understood that a man's master is whoever can control what that man fears or what that man desires, and therefore (as the old Greek had taught him), whoever would be free must fear nothing, must desire nothing that is in the control of another.

Thus it was that I put aside my moment of grief. I finished both a second cup of coffee and the rest of the paper. But I spoke a brief word of gratitude to him for his example and for his words, and stronger word of gratitude to the creator of the universe for giving us all this man of faith and courage.

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Bert Dill
Department of Rhetoric and Writing Studies
San Diego State University