April 2008
There are some topics I save up because they'll be so much fun to write about. This is one of them: a list of my heroes.
I'm not claiming this is a list of the n most admirable people. Who could make such a list, even if they wanted to?
Einstein isn't on the list, for example, even though he probably deserves to be on any shortlist of admirable people. I once asked a physicist friend if Einstein was really as smart as his fame implies, and she said that yes, he was. So why isn't he on the list? Because I had to ask. This is a list of people who've influenced me, not people who would have if I understood their work.
My test was to think of someone and ask "is this person my hero?" It often returned surprising answers. For example, it returned false for Montaigne, who was arguably the inventor of the essay. Why? When I thought about what it meant to call someone a hero, it meant I'd decide what to do by asking what they'd do in the same situation. That's a......
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