Defining Lives It is a truism, of course, that not a day goes by without someone of consequence dying. (Just ask the family and friends of even the most obscure person in a given day’s death notices.) But it is rare indeed to see a cluster of momentous lives end in so short a spell of time as we have just seen with the deaths, in rapid succession, of Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun, singer Dusty Springfield, baseball icon Joe DiMaggio, and film director Stanley Kubrick. Each of them left a void, but each of them also left a legacy that will continue to define the condition of life for the rest of us. Blackmun did so quite literally, as the author of Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision of 1973 which both legalized abortion as a medical procedure nationwide and, by employing a rubric of “viability,” attempted to hazard a guess as to just when life may be said to begin for the conceived fetus. Now as then, the national debate over that premise rages, and medical abortion continues to be the most divisive political issue of our time. Dusty Springfield may in a sense have had lesser impact, but the British-born singer made a major cultural contribution nonetheless when she wedded the European musical idiom to Memphis soul in the classic 1968 album Dusty in Memphis. Unlike many relics of the period, songs like “Son of a Preacher Man” sound brand-new today, and they illumine the pathway of racial collaboration. Stanley Kubrick (who, ironically, reversed part of Springfield’s personal journey, shifting the axis of his life and concerns from America to England) gave us mantras by which to live — and to intuit the future. Dr. Strangelove became a metaphor for dangerous martial extravagance; 2001: A Space Odyssey was a cautionary tale about the oncoming significance of computers and space travel; A Clockwork Orange pointed up the potential nightmares of a pre-planned society. And then there’s Joltin’ Joe, the Great DiMaggio, the Yankee Clipper — as he was known in his heyday as a player and as he was remembered for the rest of us in works by such cultural artisans as Paul Simon and Ernest Hemingway. DiMaggio’s stats — notably his 56-game hitting streak in 1941 — were commendable enough, but his influence transcends his Hall of Fame baseball deeds. As both player and person, he lent new meaning to the word “grace,” and to all the elusive qualities connoted by that word. Marilyn Monroe’s own mythic status owes much to her short-lived marital union to DiMaggio. Yet DiMaggio could be a homey and unthreateningly familiar presence, too — as in his long-running television commercials for a New York bank and for a leading brand of coffee-maker. Indeed, for an entire generation of Americans who never saw him play, he was just plain “Mr. Coffee.” Not all affecting deaths are of the world-famous, of course. We at the Flyer lost one of our own last week, a young scholar named Chad Eatherly who interned with us last summer and planned to do so again. (In his “Editor’s Note” for this issue, Dennis Freeland reflects on this untimely passing.) To qualify an old truism: Life goes on, but always in the ever-shifting shadow left by those who define its premises.