Blogged

Twenty-five years ago today

By Phil Barron ⋅ December 8, 2005 ⋅ ⋅ ⋅ Post a comment

About halfway through the first semester of my short-lived college career, I was walking down the hallway on the third floor of my dorm. There were few people about. I did run into one girl whose name I don’t recall. She was wandering without much direction, and looked shaken and flushed. She was crying. I asked her what was wrong.

“John Lennon’s dead,” she said in an anguished voice. “Somebody shot him.”

I don’t remember what I said in response. She wandered on down the hall and around the corner; I turned and went back to my room. My roommate, Dean (not his real name), was lounging on his bed with a magazine.

I closed the door. “Dean?” I asked.

“Yeah?”

I paused. “Who’s John Lennon?”

**********

I was a young black guy from the rural South where there wasn’t much call for the Beatles, for rock and roll, or white songwriters in general. The death of, say, Ray Parker, Jr. would have had more resonance down home (even before Ghostbusters). Of course, I wasn’t down home anymore. On campus, Lennon’s death had all the tones of a national tragedy, but it meant nothing to me except for the evident despair of people around me. It is a singular feeling to stand outside the grief of others, outside of that powerful shared experience. That divide between me and those who had grown up with Lennon taught me an unlooked-for lesson, the flip-side of diversity: the limitations of empathy. To feel for someone is not to feel what they do…though the intention is awfully sweet. There are things you can’t know short of living someone else’s life, and you’re not allowed to do that.

If this seems like a terribly private moral drawn from a cultural loss…well, I guess that’s the point. The true loss is always private.

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