Fondling One's Idols

Most of my heroes--Emperor Joshua Norton, J.S. Bach, Mark Twain, James Joyce, Bucky Fuller, Wagner, Robert Heinlein, a few others even more obscure, are dead. If I meet them at all, it will be beyond this mortal coil, in the Aether Plain.

Sometimes we're disillusioned once we learn the details of our Great Ones--Gods With Feet of Clay. We learn Leonardo and Michelangelo were fond of young boys; Mozart and Beethoven patronized prostitutes; Franz Liszt, who composed and played piano music of incredible complexity and beauty, today would be considered a New-Age flake. Reading about Liszt's Father-in-Law Wagner, magnificent as he was, brings the inescapable awareness he was quite insane. James Joyce consumed enough alcohol to pickle the County Cork, and G. Bernard Shaw was a Socialist who advocated Eugenics. H.G. Wells fathered a child out of wedlock whom he refused to support financially. Ah me, as Vonnegut, another Great, opined in an alcoholic haze, "So it goes." Yet as Voltaire, an advocate of Vivisection, remarked, "Nothing human offends me."

Another person I admire, G. Flaubert, once wrote, "It doesn't pay to fondle your idols; the gilt rubs off on your hands."

The poet Ogden Nash had the real dirt of the Greats:

Lines to be Embroidered on a Bib
OR
The Child is Father of the Man, But Not For Quite A While

So Thomas Edison
Never drank his medicine;
So Blackstone and Hoyle
Refused cod-liver oil;
So Sir Thomas Malory
Never heard of a calory;
So the Earl of Lennox
Murdered Rizzio without the aid of vitamins or calisthenox;
So Socrates and Plato
Ate dessert without finishing their potato;
So spinach was too spinachy
For Leonardo da Vinaci;
Well, it's all immaterial,
So eat your nice cereal,
And if you want to name your ration,
First go get a reputation.

Which pretty much sums it up.
I don't make up history, I just report it.