When the mind needs distraction, read 🙂
That’s how I spent this somewhat gorgeous Saturday, at home, in bed, already finished with one book and halfway through another.
A group of girlfriends had gotten together a few weeks back and traded our favorite and not so favorite books. I think I came home with the biggest pile but I had yet to start picking through.
The first book I chose was Sophie’s World. I soon realized I had read it some time back, and not so certain whether I managed to finish it. I picked up another, The Professor and the Madman, and after skimming through the preface, expected a Sherlock Holmes style tale of murder and suspense.
I soon realized that the crime has long been solved, and it was not a tale of heartless murder, but a sad story of a man who became a murderer due to his mental condition, and while he would always have to live with the guilt of his crimes, he also left his legacy as a scholar and a contributor to one of the greatest literary feats ever.
The man’s name was W. C. Minor. An American surgeon, Civil War veteran, from a well to do family with remarkable intelligence, and mentally insane. Committed to an asylum for murdering a complete stranger out of paranoia, he answered a call to volunteer for the making of the Oxford English Dictionary, and through it found a friend in the editor, James Murray. He never recovered from his illness and spent the rest of his life in mental institutions, but he was no longer just the crazy murderer, but one of the top contributors to the Oxford English Dictionary.
Every one of us has used a dictionary. Whether it was the old, bulky paper kind, the slim electronic ones that fit in your pocket, or dictionary.com, who would ever think that at one point they didn’t exist? That Shakespeare never had any point of reference for the words he used in his plays, and people in 19th century London could never settle the argument of how to spell supersede (trust me, there is no “c” in supersede)? While we now take for granted the ease of contributing information through wiki or urban dictionary, the task was far more difficult in the 1800s, when James Murray took on the monumental task of editing the first edition of OED. And he, along with contributors like W.C. Minor, spent not years, but decades on this singular task, looking through volumes of archaic texts, searching for the most suitable definition of the obscure as well as the common words.
Isn’t it great to leave something for the world? I thought as I finished the final chapter. Some say, children are the legacies people leave. While that may be true, but what of the life we lead before the children came along? Were we not at one time young and ambitious and out to conquer the world? Most of us would never made it to the newspaper headlines as CEOs of Fortune 500 companies or Olympic gold medalists, does it mean we have no story worth mentioning? No pride worth sharing? If I were to disappear from this world tomorrow, I would hope that I left something that could be shown to the world with pride. Perhaps that is just my Leo perspective, always hoping to be center stage with the spotlight shining on me. But I’d like to think everyone wants to be remembered, and remembered for something great.
Do you want to be remembered? And if so, have you found what you want to be remembered for?
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