Of greatness and men
In retrospect, I find it ironic that I should be the one repudiating the Great Man theory of history. Ivo was the evolutionist, the scientist who saw the beginnings of life in tiny amoebas that came into being when the earth was hotter than any hell imaginable; the neo-Darwinist who argued strenuously against any God and, by extrapolation, against the superiority of one man over another; the proponent of learning as the means of eradicating prejudice and therein so many injustices dealt by man to his fellow.
And yet, for all the adages he flung at me like daggers, he was the very embodiment of the great secular Humanist. He belonged to that sacred era of Enlightenment when men devoted themselves entirely to intellectual interchange. He was too bright, too learned, too accomplished to fit in this very real world. The academic life became his safe-harbor; there, he could pretend that all was as it should be.
He deplored my ignorance, declaring me an atavistic throwback, noting that in earlier centuries it was presumed man would learn literature and art on the side – formal education was for the sciences and mathematics. He was appalled that nothing in my early education had stuck, that I should be so fundamentally backward – agrarian– in my outlook on the world. We were separated, he and I, not merely by decades but by a culture that admitted only the elite, the select few who had the drive and intelligence to differentiate themselves from the rest of the lowly masses.
I look at Ivo now and see that he would have been happiest cloistered from the banality of life. He should have been a Jesuit priest, a rabbi, or maybe Erasmus. The constant friction he endured trying to find his place among ordinary men is what broke him in the end. And I understand today as I did not then that my part in his life is to protect him from the ordinariness of his existence.