Saturday, August 16, 2014

Robin Williams

Robin Williams ended his life this past week and after all the talk of alcoholism, drug addiction, clinical depression and the early stages of Parkinson's -- as we struggle to understand how a man so rich with joy that he can share with the entire world yet be tortured enough to take his own life -- I have finally reached a conclusion:

I don't and can't and will therefore never get it.

Maybe Robin's gifts so isolated him from lesser beings like ourselves that we drove him mad of boredom.

Or maybe the cacophony of noise inside his unfiltered creative genius drove him to throw the off switch just so he could get a night's sleep.

Maybe a lot of other things.

I don't spend much time on questions that have no answers for me. But I think I owe Robin the gratitude and respect of not assuming he is to be pitied.

Enough of the "tortured soul" stuff.

I choose to think Robin Williams was called home because his work here was finished. And his work should never be minimized by the superficial arts of critics and students.

Academics, as Robin showed us time and again, are merely sign posts to self discovery. And unless we are instinctively inspired by a higher source, as he apparently was -- we need to just dive in and live our lives.