April 2008There are some topics I save up because they'll be so much fun towrite 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 probablydeserves to be on any shortlist of admirable people. I once askeda physicist friend if Einstein was really as smart as his fameimplies, and she said that yes, he was. So why isn't he on thelist? Because I had to ask. This is a list of people who'veinfluenced me, not people who would have if I understood their work.My test was to think of someone and ask "is this person myhero?" It often returned surprising answers. For example,it returned false for Montaigne, who was arguably the inventor ofthe essay. Why? When I thoughtabout what it meant to call someone a hero, it meant I'd decide whatto 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, andthere was, a very clear one. Everyone on the list had two qualities:they cared almost excessively about their work, and they wereabsolutely honest. By honest I don't mean trustworthy so much asthat they never pander: they never say or do something becausethat's what the audience wants. They are all fundamentally subversivefor this reason, though they conceal it to varying degrees.Jack LambertI grew up in Pittsburgh in the 1970s. Unless you were there it'shard to imagine how that town felt about the Steelers. Locally,all the news was bad. The steel industry was dying. But theSteelers were the best team in football — and moreover, in away that seemed to reflect the personality of the city. They didn'tdo anything fancy. They just got the job done.Other players were more famous: Terry Bradshaw, Franco Harris, LynnSwann. But they played offense, and you always get more attentionfor that. It seemed to me as a twelve year old football expertthat the best of them all was Jack Lambert. And what made him sogood was that he was utterly relentless. He didn't just care aboutplaying well; he cared almost too much. He seemed to regard it asa personal insult when someone from the other team had possessionof 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 theirjobs working for big companies. Everything that came to us throughthe 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 anysubject. Most people who write about art history don't really likeart; you can tell from a thousand little signs. But Clark did, andnot just intellectually, but the way one anticipates a deliciousdinner.What really makes him stand out, though, is the quality of hisideas. His style is deceptively casual, but there is more in his books than in a libraryof art monographs. Reading The Nude is like a ride in aFerrari. Just as you're getting settled, you're slammed back inyour seat by the acceleration. Before you can adjust, you're thrownsideways as the car screeches into the first turn. His brain throwsoff ideas almost too fast to grasp them. Finally at the end of thechapter you come to a halt, with your eyes wide and a big smile onyour face.Kenneth Clark was a star in his day, thanks to the documentaryseries Civilisation. And if you read only one book aboutart history, Civilisation is the one I'd recommend. It'smuch better than the drab Sears Catalogs of art that undergraduatesare 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 linedrawn between third and fourth grade. After Mr. Mihalko, everythingwas different.Why? First of all, he was intellectually curious. I had a fewother teachers who were smart, but I wouldn't describe them asintellectually curious. In retrospect, he was out of place as anelementary school teacher, and I think he knew it. That must havebeen hard for him, but it was wonderful for us, his students. Hisclass was a constant adventure. I used to like going to schoolevery day.The other thing that made him different was that he liked us. Kidsare good at telling that. The other teachers were at best benevolentlyindifferent. But Mr. Mihalko seemed like he actually wanted tobe our friend. On the last day of fourth grade, he got out one ofthe heavy school record players and played James Taylor's "You'veGot a Friend" to us. Just call out my name, and you know whereverI am, I'll come running. He died at 59 of lung cancer. I've nevercried like I cried at his funeral.LeonardoOne of the things I've learned about making things that I didn'trealize when I was a kid is that much of the best stuff isn't madefor audiences, but for oneself. You see paintings and drawings inmuseums and imagine they were made for you to look at. Actually alot of the best ones were made as a way of exploring the world, notas a way to please other people. The best of these explorationsare sometimes more pleasing than stuff made explicitly to please.Leonardo did a lot of things. One of his most admirable qualitieswas that he did so many different things that were admirable. Whatpeople know of him now is his paintings and his more flamboyantinventions, like flying machines. That makes him seem like somekind of dreamer who sketched artists' conceptions of rocket shipson the side. In fact he made a large number of far more practicaltechnical discoveries. He was as good an engineer as a painter.His most impressive work, to me, is his drawings. They're clearlymade more as a way of studying the world than producing somethingbeautiful. And yet they can hold their own with any work of artever made. No one else, before or since, was that good when no onewas looking.Robert MorrisRobert Morris has a very unusual quality: he's never wrong. Itmight seem this would require you to be omniscient, but actuallyit's surprisingly easy. Don't say anything unless you're fairlysure of it. If you're not omniscient, you just don't end up sayingmuch.More precisely, the trick is to pay careful attention to how youqualify what you say. By using this trick, Robert has, as far asI know, managed to be mistaken only once, and that was when he wasan undergrad. When the Mac came out, he said that little desktopcomputers would never be suitable for real hacking.It's wrong to call it a trick in his case, though. If it were aconscious trick, he would have slipped in a moment of excitement.With Robert this quality is wired-in. He has an almost superhumanintegrity. He's not just generally correct, but also correct abouthow correct he is.You'd think it would be such a great thing never to be wrong thateveryone would do this. It doesn't seem like that much extra workto pay as much attention to the error on an idea as to the ideaitself. And yet practically no one does. I know how hard it is,because since meeting Robert I've tried to do in software what heseems to do in hardware.P. G. WodehousePeople are finally starting to admit that Wodehouse was a greatwriter. If you want to be thought a great novelist in your owntime, you have to sound intellectual. If what you write is popular,or entertaining, or funny, you're ipso facto suspect. That makesWodehouse doubly impressive, because it meant that to write as hewanted to, he had to commit to being despised in his own lifetime.Evelyn Waugh called him a great writer, but to most people at thetime that would have read as a chivalrous or deliberately perversegesture. At the time any random autobiographical novel by a recentcollege grad could count on more respectful treatment from theliterary establishment.Wodehouse may have begun with simple atoms, but the way he composedthem into molecules was near faultless. His rhythm in particular.It makes me self-conscious to write about it. I can think of onlytwo other writers who came near him for style: Evelyn Waugh andNancy Mitford. Those three used the English language like theyowned it.But Wodehouse has something neither of them did. He's at ease.Evelyn Waugh and Nancy Mitford cared what other people thought ofthem: he wanted to seem aristocratic; she was afraid she wasn'tsmart enough. But Wodehouse didn't give a damn what anyone thoughtof him. He wrote exactly what he wanted.Alexander CalderCalder's on this list because he makes me happy. Can his work standup to Leonardo's? Probably not. There might not be anything fromthe 20th Century that can. But what was good about Modernism,Calder had, and had in a way that he made seem effortless.What was good about Modernism was its freshness. Art became stuffyin the nineteenth century. The paintings that were popular at thetime were mostly the art equivalent of McMansions—big,pretentious, and fake. Modernism meant starting over, making thingswith the same earnest motives that children might. The artists whobenefited most from this were the ones who had preserved a child'sconfidence, like Klee and Calder.Klee was impressive because he could work in so many differentstyles. But between the two I like Calder better, because his workseemed happier. Ultimately the point of art is to engage the viewer.It's hard to predict what will; often something that seems interestingat first will bore you after a month. Calder's sculptures neverget boring. They just sit there quietly radiating optimism, likea battery that never runs out. As far as I can tell from books andphotographs, the happiness of Calder's work is his own happinessshowing through.Jane AustenEveryone admires Jane Austen. Add my name to the list. To me sheseems the best novelist of all time.I'm interested in how things work. When I read most novels, I payas much attention to the author's choices as to the story. But inher novels I can't see the gears at work. Though I'd really liketo know how she does what she does, I can't figure it out, becauseshe's so good that her stories don't seem made up. I feel like I'mreading a description of something that actually happened.I used to read a lot of novels when I was younger. I can't readmost anymore, because they don't have enough information in them.Novels seem so impoverished compared to history and biography. But reading Austen is like readingnonfiction. She writes so well you don't even notice her.John McCarthyJohn McCarthy invented Lisp, the field of (or at least the term)artificial intelligence, and was an early member of both of the toptwo computer science departments, MIT and Stanford. No one woulddispute that he's one of the greats, but he's an especial hero tome because of Lisp.It's hard for us now to understand what a conceptual leap that wasat the time. Paradoxically, one of the reasons his achievement ishard to appreciate is that it was so successful. Practically everyprogramming language invented in the last 20 years includes ideasfrom Lisp, and each year the median language gets more Lisplike.In 1958 these ideas were anything but obvious. In 1958 there seemto have been two ways of thinking about programming. Some peoplethought of it as math, and proved things about Turing Machines.Others thought of it as a way to get things done, and designedlanguages all too influenced by the technology of the day. McCarthyalone bridged the gap. He designed a language that was math. Butdesigned is not really the word; discovered is more like it.The SpitfireAs I was making this list I found myself thinking of people likeDouglas Bader and R.J. Mitchell and Jeffrey Quill and I realizedthat though all of them had done many things in their lives, therewas one factor above all that connected them: the Spitfire.This is supposed to be a list of heroes. How can a machine be onit? Because that machine was not just a machine. It was a lensof heroes. Extraordinary devotion went into it, and extraordinarycourage came out.It's a cliche to call World War II a contest between good and evil,but between fighter designs, it really was. The Spitfire's originalnemesis, the ME 109, was a brutally practical plane. It was akilling machine. The Spitfire was optimism embodied. And not justin its beautiful lines: it was at the edge of what could bemanufactured. But taking the high road worked. In the air, beautyhad the edge, just.Steve JobsPeople alive when Kennedy was killed usually remember exactly wherethey were when they heard about it. I remember exactly where I waswhen a friend asked if I'd heard Steve Jobs had cancer. It waslike the floor dropped out. A few seconds later she told me thatit was a rare operable type, and that he'd be ok. But those secondsseemed long.I wasn't sure whether to include Jobs on this list. A lot of peopleat Apple seem to be afraid of him, which is a bad sign. But hecompels admiration.There's no name for what Steve Jobs is, because there hasn't beenanyone quite like him before. He doesn't design Apple's productshimself. Historically the closest analogy to what he does are thegreat Renaissance patrons of the arts. As the CEO of a company,that makes him unique.Most CEOs delegate taste to a subordinate.The design paradox means they're choosing more or less at random. But SteveJobs actually has taste himself — such good taste that he's shownthe world how much more important taste is than they realized.Isaac NewtonNewton has a strange role in my pantheon of heroes: he's the one Ireproach myself with. He worked on big things, at least for partof his life. It's so easy to get distracted working on small stuff.The questions you're answering are pleasantly familiar. You getimmediate rewards — in fact, you get bigger rewards in yourtime if you work on matters of passing importance. But I'muncomfortably aware that this is the route to well-deserved obscurity.To do really great things, you have to seek out questions peopledidn't even realize were questions. There have probably been otherpeople who did this as well as Newton, for their time, but Newtonis my model of this kind of thought. I can just begin to understandwhat it must have felt like for him.You only get one life. Why not do something huge? The phrase "paradigmshift" is overused now, but Kuhn was onto something. And you knowmore are out there, separated from us by what will later seem asurprisingly thin wall of laziness and stupidity. If we work likeNewton.Thanks to Trevor Blackwell, Jessica Livingston, and Jackie McDonough for reading drafts of this.
