Whenever I came across an essay by Edward Said, I prepared myself to have my world turned slightly on ear. I approached such articles with tinges of dread for the alienation it might cause me by knowing. Now that he's dead I find myself regretting that I hadn't done more to seek him out. For nobody represented to me the example of a Renaissance Man than Edward Said.
His writing and thinking were remarkably precise. In the days that I was an avid reader of The Nation, I would like the plucky punch of Cockburn, but when I read Said I always felt that I was getting an education. He knew music, he know politics. He knew America, he knew the Middle East. He knew the Episcopal Chruch, he knew Islam. There seemed to be nothing beyond his capacity for understanding, and yet he chose to involve himself, deeply, in the most controversial and basic of human problems, that of warring peoples. He was passionate, he was scholarly. He was a mighty man. He simply exemplified what a highly intelligent and civilized man should be in our modern world.
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