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One year ago
Slightly under a year ago, I was asked to write a small piece, not a memorial but a memory. It was intended to have been read in a memorial Roman Catholic mass, which I'm sure would have simultaneously annoyed and amused its subject. For reasons never understood, it was not read, and I saved it for today.
I've been asked to say a few words in remembrance of Tim. This is hard for me to do, because my awareness of Tim began before any actual memories I have, and he's such a large part of everything I've ever remembered, as much a part of the filter through which I have memories as he is a memory, but I will try to keep this to a few minutes.
I'd like to start with a quotation from our host that I'm fairly sure Tim liked.
In 1982, my best friend, Kenny, had cracked a computer in the UNC system, with which we wasted many a pleasant hour. I remember sitting Tim down in front of the terminal and talking him through his first Unix session and his first trip into Usenet. It was one of the few times that I lead him into something cool--but it gave him two things he always wanted. First, it was a computer system which human beings could actually use. Second, it lead him to an audience--but better than an audience, it was a community, made of intelligent people, a commuity large enough to challenge him, smart enough to understand him.
Last week, my friend Teresa e-mailed me her condolences on the news. She had only ever met Tim on-line, part of that large and smart community They hadn't gotten along, unfortunately--they were tuned to different frequencies then, and clashed. But last week, she said, "I discover now to my surprise, that I'd been expecting that one of these year I'd get to know him better."
I felt that way about Tim my entire life.
The last time Tim posted to his journal, he wrote about how glad he was that he had had a chance to make up to his friend Ebony from whom he had been estranged, shortly before Ebony died. Tim concluded,
I add this now.
One of the strongest associations I have with Tim--one of the specific things that always makes me think of him, rather than one of the general things that often leads me to remember him--is our shared love of the writings of Gene Wolfe; he continued to read Wolfe after he had stopped reading other f&sf. We read, together, his landmark series The Book of the New Sun as it was being published in the early 1980s. The first volume, The Shadow of the Torturer, has this epigraph:
This is a stanza from Isaac Watts's "Our God, Our Help in Ages Past." It should not have surprised me that the forces of coincidence, the strongest forces in human life, brought that hymn to the memorial mass.
In turn, that reminded me of the Kipling verse that Wolfe used as the epigraph for the final volume of New Sun.
I've been asked to say a few words in remembrance of Tim. This is hard for me to do, because my awareness of Tim began before any actual memories I have, and he's such a large part of everything I've ever remembered, as much a part of the filter through which I have memories as he is a memory, but I will try to keep this to a few minutes.
I'd like to start with a quotation from our host that I'm fairly sure Tim liked.
Jesus said, "Let him who seeks continue seeking until he finds. When he finds, he will become troubled. When he becomes troubled, he will be astonished, and he will rule over All."
In 1982, my best friend, Kenny, had cracked a computer in the UNC system, with which we wasted many a pleasant hour. I remember sitting Tim down in front of the terminal and talking him through his first Unix session and his first trip into Usenet. It was one of the few times that I lead him into something cool--but it gave him two things he always wanted. First, it was a computer system which human beings could actually use. Second, it lead him to an audience--but better than an audience, it was a community, made of intelligent people, a commuity large enough to challenge him, smart enough to understand him.
Last week, my friend Teresa e-mailed me her condolences on the news. She had only ever met Tim on-line, part of that large and smart community They hadn't gotten along, unfortunately--they were tuned to different frequencies then, and clashed. But last week, she said, "I discover now to my surprise, that I'd been expecting that one of these year I'd get to know him better."
I felt that way about Tim my entire life.
The last time Tim posted to his journal, he wrote about how glad he was that he had had a chance to make up to his friend Ebony from whom he had been estranged, shortly before Ebony died. Tim concluded,
And it is very strange, given what transpired between us and that we were only on good terms for one short season, but I still mourn him today, and sometimes think I see him when I look into the nighttime stars.
I add this now.
One of the strongest associations I have with Tim--one of the specific things that always makes me think of him, rather than one of the general things that often leads me to remember him--is our shared love of the writings of Gene Wolfe; he continued to read Wolfe after he had stopped reading other f&sf. We read, together, his landmark series The Book of the New Sun as it was being published in the early 1980s. The first volume, The Shadow of the Torturer, has this epigraph:
A thousand ages in Thy sight
Are like an evening gone;
Short as the watch that ends the night
Before the rising sun.
This is a stanza from Isaac Watts's "Our God, Our Help in Ages Past." It should not have surprised me that the forces of coincidence, the strongest forces in human life, brought that hymn to the memorial mass.
In turn, that reminded me of the Kipling verse that Wolfe used as the epigraph for the final volume of New Sun.
At two o'clock in the morning, if you open your window and listen,
You will hear the feet of the Wind that is going to call the sun.
And the trees in the shadow rustle and the trees in the moonlight glisten,
And though it is deep, dark night, you feel that the night is done.
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