martes, 31 de marzo de 2015

Un Corredor Sin Hogar


Scott Fitzgerald

F. Scott Fitzgerald on the Secret of Great Writing

by 
“Nothing any good isn’t hard.”
What is the secret of great writing? For David Foster Wallace, it was about fun. For Henry Miller, about discovery. Susan Sontag saw it asself-exploration. Many literary greats anchored it to their daily routines. And yet, the answer remains elusive and ever-changing.
In the fall of 1938, Radcliffe College sophomore Frances Turnbull sent her latest short story to family friend F. Scott Fitzgerald. His response, found in F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Life in Letters (UKpublic library) — the same volume that gave us Fitzgerald’s heartwarming fatherly advice and his brilliantly acerbic response to hate mail — echoes Anaïs Nin’s insistence uponthe importance of emotional investment in writing and offers some uncompromisingly honest advice on essence of great writing:
November 9, 1938
Dear Frances:
I’ve read the story carefully and, Frances, I’m afraid the price for doing professional work is a good deal higher than you are prepared to pay at present. You’ve got to sell your heart, your strongest reactions, not the little minor things that only touch you lightly, the little experiences that you might tell at dinner. This is especially true when you begin to write, when you have not yet developed the tricks of interesting people on paper, when you have none of the technique which it takes time to learn. When, in short, you have only your emotions to sell.
This is the experience of all writers. It was necessary for Dickens to put into Oliver Twist the child’s passionate resentment at being abused and starved that had haunted his whole childhood. Ernest Hemingway’s first stories ‘In Our Time’ went right down to the bottom of all that he had ever felt and known. In ‘This Side of Paradise’ I wrote about a love affair that was still bleeding as fresh as the skin wound on a haemophile.
The amateur, seeing how the professional having learned all that he’ll ever learn about writing can take a trivial thing such as the most superficial reactions of three uncharacterized girls and make it witty and charming — the amateur thinks he or she can do the same. But the amateur can only realize his ability to transfer his emotions to another person by some such desperate and radical expedient as tearing your first tragic love story out of your heart and putting it on pages for people to see.
That, anyhow, is the price of admission. Whether you are prepared to pay it or, whether it coincides or conflicts with your attitude on what is ‘nice’ is something for you to decide. But literature, even light literature, will accept nothing less from the neophyte. It is one of those professions that wants the ‘works.’ You wouldn’t be interested in a soldier who was only a little brave.
In the light of this, it doesn’t seem worth while to analyze why this story isn’t saleable but I am too fond of you to kid you along about it, as one tends to do at my age. If you ever decide to tell your stories, no one would be more interested than,
Your old friend,
F. Scott Fitzgerald
P.S. I might say that the writing is smooth and agreeable and some of the pages very apt and charming. You have talent — which is the equivalent of a soldier having the right physical qualifications for entering West Point.
Two years prior, in another letter to his fifteen-year-old daughter Scottie upon her enrollment in high school, Fitzgerald offered more wisdom on the promise and perils of writing:
Grove Park Inn
Asheville, N.C.
October 20, 1936
Dearest Scottina:
[…]
Don’t be a bit discouraged about your story not being tops. At the same time, I am not going to encourage you about it, because, after all, if you want to get into the big time, you have to have your own fences to jump and learn from experience. Nobody ever became a writer just by wanting to be one. If you have anything to say, anything you feel nobody has ever said before, you have got to feel it so desperately that you will find some way to say it that nobody has ever found before, so that the thing you have to say and the way of saying it blend as one matter—as indissolubly as if they were conceived together.
Let me preach again for one moment: I mean that what you have felt and thought will by itself invent a new style so that when people talk about style they are always a little astonished at the newness of it, because they think that is only style that they are talking about, when what they are talking about is the attempt to express a new idea with such force that it will have the originality of the thought. It is an awfully lonesome business, and as you know, I never wanted you to go into it, but if you are going into it at all I want you to go into it knowing the sort of things that took me years to learn.
[…]
Nothing any good isn’t hard, and you know you have never been brought up soft, or are you quitting on me suddenly? Darling, you know I love you, and I expect you to live up absolutely to what I laid out for you in the beginning.
Scott

Randy Pausch (Last lecture)


lunes, 30 de marzo de 2015

Simon Wiesenthal



At the end of World War II, thousands of Nazis who participated in the systematic murder of some 6,000,000 Jews and millions of Gypsies, Poles and other "inferior" peoples, slipped through the Allied net and escaped to countries around the globe, where many still live in freedom. 
Simon Wiesenthal, a survivor of the Nazi death camps, dedicated his life to documenting the crimes of the Holocaust and to hunting down the perpetrators still at large. "When history looks back," Wiesenthal explained, "I want people to know the Nazis weren’t able to kill millions of people and get away with it." His work stands as a reminder and a warning for future generations.

As founder and head of the Jewish Documentation Center in Vienna, the freelance Nazi hunter, usually with the cooperation of the Israeli, Austrian, former West German and other governments, ferreted out nearly 1,100 Nazi war criminals, including Adolf Eichmann, the administrator of the slaughter of the Jews; Franz Murer, "The Butcher of Wilno," and Erich Rajakowitsch, in charge of the "death transports" in Holland. Accounts of his grim sleuthing are detailed in his memoirs, The Murderers Among Us (1967). His other books include, Sails of Hope (1973), Sunflower (1970), Max and Helen" (1982), Krystyna (1987), Every Day Remembrance Day (1987), and Justice Not Vengeance (1989). In 1989, a film based on Mr. Wiesenthal’s life entitled, Murderers Among Us: The Simon Wiesenthal Story was produced by Home Box Office and starred Academy Award-winning actor Ben Kingsley as Simon Wiesenthal.

Simon Wiesenthal was born on December 31, 1908 in Buczacz, in what is now the Lvov Oblast section of the Ukraine. When Wiesenthal's father was killed in World War I, Mrs. Wiesenthal took her family and fled to Vienna for a brief period, returning to Buczacz when she remarried. The young Wiesenthal graduated from the Gymnasium in 1928 and applied for admission to the Polytechnic Institute in Lvov. Turned away because of quota restrictions on Jewish students, he went instead to the Technical University of Prague, from which he received his degree in architectural engineering in 1932.
In 1936, Simon married Cyla Mueller and worked in an architectural office in Lvov. Their life together was happy until 1939 when Germany and Russia signed their "non-aggression" pact and agreed to partition Poland between them; the Russian army soon occupied Lvov, and shortly afterward began the Red purge of Jewish merchants, factory owners and other professionals. In the purge of "bourgeois" elements that followed the Soviet occupation of Lvov Oblast at the beginning of World War II, Wiesenthal's stepfather was arrested by the NKVD (People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs - Soviet Secret Police) and eventually died in prison, his stepbrother was shot, and Wiesenthal himself, forced to close his business, became a mechanic in a bedspring factory. Later he saved himself, his wife, and his mother from deportation to Siberia by bribing an NKVD commissar. When the Germans displaced the Russians in 1941, a former employee of his, then serving the collaborationist Ukrainian Auxiliary police, helped him to escape execution by the Nazis. But he did not escape incarceration. Following initial detention in the Janowska concentration camp just outside Lvov, he and his wife were assigned to the forced labor camp serving the Ostbahn Works, the repair shop for Lvov's Eastern Railroad.
Early in 1942, the Nazi hierarchy formally decided on the "Final Solution" to the "Jewish problem" -- annihilation. Throughout occupied Europe a terrifying genocide machine was put into operation. In August 1942, Wiesenthal's mother was sent to the Belzec death camp. By September, most of his and his wife's relatives were dead; a total of eighty-nine members of both families perished.

Because his wife's blonde hair gave her a chance of passing as an "Aryan," Wiesenthal made a deal with the Polish underground. In return for detailed charts of railroad junction points made by him for use by saboteurs, his wife was provided with false papers identifying her as "Irene Kowalska," a Pole, and spirited out of the camp in the autumn of 1942. She lived in Warsaw for two years and then worked in the Rhineland as a forced laborer, without her true identity ever being discovered.
With the help of the deputy director, Wiesenthal himself escaped the Ostbahn camp in October 1943, just before the Germans began liquidating all the inmates. In June 1944, he was recaptured and sent back to Janowska where he would almost certainly have been killed had the German eastern front not collapsed under the advancing Red Army. Knowing they would be sent into combat if they had no prisoners to justify their rear-echelon assignment, the SS guards at Janowska decided to keep the few remaining inmates alive. With 34 prisoners out of an original 149,000, the 200 guards joined the general retreat westward, picking up the entire population of the village of Chelmiec along the way to adjust the prisoner-guard ratio.
Very few of the prisoners survived the westward trek through Plaszow, Gross-Rosen and Buchenwald, which ended at Mauthausen in upper Austria. Weighing less than 100 pounds and lying helplessly in a barracks where the stench was so strong that even hardboiled SS guards would not enter, Wiesenthal was barely alive when Mauthausen was liberated by the 11th Armored Division of the Third U.S. Army on May 5, 1945.
As soon as his health was sufficiently restored, Wiesenthal began gathering and preparing evidence on Nazi atrocities for the War Crimes Section of the United States Army. After the war, he also worked for the Army's Office of Strategic Services and Counter-Intelligence Corps and headed the Jewish Central Committee of the United States Zone of Austria, a relief and welfare organization. Late in 1945, he and his wife, each of whom had believed the other to be dead, were reunited, and in 1946, their daughter Pauline was born.

The evidence supplied by Wiesenthal was utilized in the American zone war crime trials. When his association with the United States Army ended in 1947, Wiesenthal and thirty volunteers opened the Jewish Historical Documentation Center in Linz, Austria, for the purpose of assembling evidence for future trials. But, as the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union intensified, both sides lost interest in prosecuting Germans, and Wiesenthal's volunteers, succumbing to frustration, drifted away to more ordinary pursuits. In 1954, the office in Linz was closed and its files were given to the Yad Vashem Archives in Israel, except for one - the dossier on Adolf Eichmann, the inconspicuous technocrat who, as chief of the Gestapo's Jewish Department, had supervised the implementation of the "Final Solution."
While continuing his salaried relief and welfare work, including the running of an occupational training school for Hungarian and other Iron Curtain refugees, Wiesenthal never relaxed in his pursuit of the elusive Eichmann who had disappeared at the time of Germany's defeat in World War II. In 1953, Wiesenthal received information that Eichmann was in Argentina from people who had spoken to him there. He passed this information on to Israel through the Israeli embassy in Vienna and in 1954 also informed Nahum Goldmann, but the FBI had received information that Eichmann was in Damascus, Syria. It was not until 1959 that Israel was informed by Germany that Eichmann was in Buenos Aires living under the alias of Ricardo Klement. He was captured there by Israeli agents and brought to Israel for trial. Eichmann was found guilty of mass murder and executed on May 31, 1961.
Encouraged by the capture of Eichmann, Wiesenthal reopened the Jewish Documentation Center, this time in Vienna, and concentrated exclusively on the hunting of war criminals. One of his high priority cases was Karl Silberbauer, the Gestapo officer who arrested Anne Frank, the fourteen year-old German-Jewish girl who was murdered by the Nazis after hiding in an Amsterdam attic for two years. Dutch neo-Nazi propagandists were fairly successful in their attempts to discredit the authenticity of Anne Frank's famous diary until Wiesenthal located Silberbauer, then a police inspector in Austria, in 1963. "Yes," Silberbauer confessed, when confronted, "I arrested Anne Frank."
In October 1966, sixteen SS officers, nine of them found by Wiesenthal, went on trial in Stuttgart, West Germany, for participation in the extermination of Jews in Lvov. High on Wiesenthal's most-wanted list was Franz Stangl, the commandant of the Treblinka and Sobibor concentration camps in Poland. After three years of patient undercover work by Wiesenthal, Stangl was located in Brazil and remanded to West Germany for imprisonment in 1967. He was sentenced to life imprisonment and died in prison.
Wiesenthal's book of memoirs, The Murderers Among Us, was published in 1967. During a visit to the United States to promote the book, Wiesenthal announced that he had found Mrs. Hermine Ryan, nee Braunsteiner, a housewife living in Queens, New York. According to the dossier, Mrs. Ryan had supervised the killings of several hundred children at Majdanek. She was extradited to Germany for trial as a war criminal in 1973 and received life imprisonment.
The Jewish Documentation Center in Vienna was a nondescript, sparsely furnished three-room office with a staff of four, including Wiesenthal. Contrary to belief, Wiesenthal did not usually track down the Nazi fugitives himself. His chief task was gathering and analyzing information. In that work he was aided by a vast, informal, international network of friends, colleagues, and sympathizers, including German World War II veterans, appalled by the horrors they witnessed. He even received tips from former Nazis with grudges against other former Nazis. A special branch of his Vienna office documented the activities of right-wing groups, neo-Nazis and similar organizations.
Painstakingly, Wiesenthal culled every pertinent document and record he got and listened to the many personal accounts told him by individual survivors. With an architect's structural acumen, a Talmudist's thoroughness, and a brilliant talent for investigative thinking, he pieced together the most obscure, incomplete, and apparently irrelevant and unconnected data to build cases solid enough to stand up in a court of law. The dossiers were then presented to the appropriate authorities. When, as often happens, they failed to take action, whether from indifference, pro-Nazi sentiment, or some other consideration, Wiesenthal went to the press and other media, for experience taught him that publicity and an outraged public opinion are powerful weapons.
The work yet to be done was enormous. Germany’s war criminal files contained more than 90,000 names, most of them of people who have never been tried. Thousands of former Nazis, not named in any files, are also known to be at large, often in positions of prominence, throughout Germany. Aside from the cases themselves, there is the tremendous task of persuading authorities and the public that the Nazi Holocaust was massive and pervasive. In the final paragraph of his memoirs, he quotes what an SS corporal told him in 1944: "You would tell the truth [about the death camps] to the people in America. That's right. And you know what would happen, Wiesenthal? They wouldn't believe you. They’d say you were mad. Might even put you into an asylum. How can anyone believe this terrible business - unless he has lived through it?"
Among Mr. Wiesenthal's many honors include an Honorary Knighthood of the British Empire from Queen Elizabeth II of Great Britain, the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Clinton, decorations from the Austrian and French resistance movements, the Dutch Freedom Medal, the Luxembourg Freedom Medal, the United Nations League for the Help of Refugees Award, the U.S. Congressional Gold Medal presented to him by President Jimmy Carter in 1980, and the French Legion of Honor which he received in 1986. Wiesenthal was a consultant for the motion picture thriller, The Odessa File(Paramount, 1974). The Boys from Brazil (Twentieth Century Fox, 1978), a major motion picture based on Ira Levin's book of the same name, starring Sir Laurence Olivier as Herr Lieberman, a character styled after Wiesenthal.
In November 1977, the Simon Wiesenthal Center was founded. Today, together with its world renowned Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles and the New York Tolerancenter, it is an international center for Holocaust remembrance, the defense of human rights and the Jewish people. With offices throughout the world, the Wiesenthal Center carries on the continuing fight against bigotry and antisemitism and pursues an active agenda of related contemporary issues. "I have received many honors in my lifetime," said Mr. Wiesenthal. "When I die, these honors will die with me. But the Simon Wiesenthal Center will live on as my legacy."
In 1981, the Wiesenthal Center produced the Academy AwardTM-winning documentary, Genocide, narrated by Elizabeth Taylor and the late Orson Welles, and introduced by Simon Wiesenthal.
Wiesenthal lived in a modest apartment in Vienna and spent his evenings answering letters, studying books and files, and working on his stamp collection. He lived there with his wife Cyla until her death on November 10, 2003.
Simon Wiesenthal received numerous anonymous threats and insulting letters. In June 1982, a bomb exploded at the front door of his house causing a great deal of damage. Fortunately, no one was hurt. After that, his house and office were guarded by an armed policeman. One German and several Austrian neo-Nazis were arrested for the bombing. The German, who was found to be the main perpetrator, was sentenced to five years in prison.
Wiesenthal was often asked to explain his motives for becoming a Nazi hunter. According to Clyde Farnsworth in the New York Times Magazine (February 2, 1964), Wiesenthal once spent the Sabbath at the home of a former Mauthausen inmate, now a well-to-do jewelry manufacturer. After dinner his host said, "Simon, if you had gone back to building houses, you'd be a millionaire. Why didn't you?" "You're a religious man," replied Wiesenthal. "You believe in God and life after death. I also believe. When we come to the other world and meet the millions of Jews who died in the camps and they ask us, ‘What have you done?,’ there will be many answers. You will say, ‘I became a jeweler,’ Another will say, ‘I have smuggled coffee and American cigarettes,’ Another will say, ‘I built houses,’ But I will say, ‘I did not forget you’."
On September 20, 2005, Simon Wiesenthal died peacefully in his sleep at his home. After a service at Vienna’s Central Cemetery attended by Austrian Prime Minister Wolfgang Schuessel, government officials, diplomats and leaders of religious communities, he was taken to Israel and laid to rest in Herzliya.
In his eulogy, Rabbi Marvin Hier, founder and dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center said, "As you go to your eternal repose, I am sure there is a great stirring in heaven as the soul of the millions murdered during the Nazi Holocaust get ready to welcome Simon Wiesenthal, the man who stood up for their honor and never let the world forget them."
 http://www.wiesenthal.com

Edgar Allan Poe



Dreams

Oh! that my young life were a lasting dream!
My spirit not awakening, till the beam
Of an Eternity should bring the morrow.
Yes! tho' that long dream were of hopeless sorrow,
'Twere better than the cold reality
Of waking life, to him whose heart must be,
And hath been still, upon the lovely earth,
A chaos of deep passion, from his birth.
But should it be- that dream eternally
Continuing- as dreams have been to me
In my young boyhood- should it thus be given,
'Twere folly still to hope for higher Heaven.
For I have revell'd, when the sun was bright
I' the summer sky, in dreams of living light
And loveliness,- have left my very heart
In climes of my imagining, apart
From mine own home, with beings that have been
Of mine own thought- what more could I have seen?
'Twas once- and only once- and the wild hour
From my remembrance shall not pass- some power
Or spell had bound me- 'twas the chilly wind
Came o'er me in the night, and left behind
Its image on my spirit- or the moon
Shone on my slumbers in her lofty noon
Too coldly- or the stars- howe'er it was
That dream was as that night-wind- let it pass.


I have been happy, tho' in a dream.
I have been happy- and I love the theme:
Dreams! in their vivid coloring of life,
As in that fleeting, shadowy, misty strife
Of semblance with reality, which brings
To the delirious eye, more lovely things
Of Paradise and Love- and all our own!
Than young Hope in his sunniest hour hath known

"Carpe Diem"


José Luis Sampedro

El libro de la sabiduría de José Luis Sampedro

Un volumen de reflexiones inéditas conmemora el segundo aniversario de su muerte

José Luis Sampedro
El escritor y economista español José Luis Sampedro en marzo de 2011. / ULY MARTÍN
“Aquel que está contento consigo mismo / ha realizado un trabajo carente de valor. / El éxito es el principio del fracaso. / La fama es el comienzo de la desgracia”. El hombre que un día reparó en estas líneas de El camino de Chuang Tzu traducidas por Thomas Merton se llamaba José Luis Sampedro y murió en su casa de Madrid en abril de 2013, pronto hará dos años. Para “evitar el circo mediático en torno a la muerte de los famosos”, aquel novelista, académico, profesor de varios ministros de Economía y referente de los indignados, pidió que la noticia se hiciera pública cuando él ya hubiera sido incinerado. Así lo hizo Olga Lucas, su mujer y colaboradora en sus últimos libros, que retoma ahora las últimas voluntades de su marido para publicar La vida perenne(Plaza Janés), que llega hoy a las librerías.
Completado con fotografías de Chema Madoz, cuyos poemas visuales habían ilustrado ya las cubiertas de varias obras de Sampedro, La vida perenne es un volumen sin género preciso, algo así como el libro de la sabiduría del autor de La sonrisa etrusca, una colección de citas ajenas y reflexiones propias. En sus páginas conviven, en efecto, la sabiduría del escritor y la que este descubrió en los demás, sobre todo en el taoísmo y el hinduismo, la mística occidental y la sufí. Como cuenta en el prólogo Olga Lucas, responsable de la edición junto a Ángel Lucía, gran amigo del autor, José Luis Sampedro llegó a estudiar árabe para entender mejor las notas a pie de página en los textos de Jalal Ud-din Rumi, en su opinión, “uno de los más altos poetas de la literatura”. Su experiencia con la poesía sufí, ya presente en la novela Octubre, Octubre, “fue para él un descubrimiento iluminador”, afirma Lucas.
Con ecos declarados de La filosofía perenne, de Aldoux Huxley, el libro que ahora ve la luz revela la dimensión más “espiritual” de un autor nacido en Barcelona el 1 de febrero de 1917 y recriado en Tánger, Soria, Aranjuez y Santander, que terminó siendo catedrático de Estructura Económica en la Universidad Complutense y Premio Nacional de las Letras pero rechazaba que lo llamaran maestro. “Una vela, un quinqué dan luz, iluminan, permiten ver; en cambio, unos focos deslumbran, ciegan, dificultan la visión. El maestro está para ayudar a ver, no para cegar a sus discípulos”, escribe Sampedro en una de sus anotaciones justo antes de lamentar que los ideales de nuestro tiempo hayan quedado “reducidos prácticamente al éxito económico”, algo que, continúa, “ha degradado las ilusiones, la dedicación, la gran aventura, la vida interior, en muchos casos… el componente misterioso, al que uno puede aproximarse, sin tener la seguridad de encontrar respuestas”.
El autor lamenta que los ideales actuales se limiten al éxito económico
“Durante toda su vida José Luis Sampedro insistió en señalar que el ser humano es multidimensional, que tenemos el deber de explorar todas nuestras potencialidades y de construir una sociedad que permita que esto ocurra”, subrayan Olga Lucas y Ángel Lucía. Así, La vida perenne explora caminos que escapan a la razón pero no pierde de vista la cruda realidad del mundo. “No podemos ser tan reduccionistas como para tomar partido entre el buen salvaje o el científico”, escribe el autor de El amante lesbiano. “Llegar desde Grecia hasta aquí con tan asombrosos progresos es prodigioso. Lo importante es pararse a pensar, imprimir otro ritmo. La cuestión no es estar a favor o en contra del progreso sino cómo progresar”. Uno de los apartados de este libro póstumo se titula Libertad, igualdad, fraternidad y reúne las críticas de Sampedro al “modelo económico liberal”, que considera “agotado” pese a haber sido muy útil en la Europa que transitó desde el absolutismo a la democracia. ¿Por qué agotado? Porque choca con tres barreras: “Física, pues el derroche de recursos tropieza con los límites del planeta; política, porque el Tercer Mundo ya no acepta la explotación; y psicológica, pues el desalmado sistema reduce al hombre a mero productor-consumidor”.
Frente a la tentación de otro reduccionismo, el que identifica misterio y religión, Sampedro advierte: “Cualquier fe es una forma de ceguera. Cuando decimos: 'La fe es creer lo que no vemos', en ese mismo instante la fe nos impide ver lo que vemos”. “Yo no he tenido nunca la sensación de un alma inmortal”, dice poco antes. “Ni la necesito ni me interesa”.
Si en las primeras páginas de La vida perenne José Luis Sampedro anota que “ahora la gente no muere en casa, todo lo relativo a la muerte ocurre lejos y eso dificulta la aceptación de la muerte como algo natural”, sus últimas anotaciones son una reflexión sobre el final y una acción de gracias hacia la vida. El libro se cierra con dos líneas que empiezan y terminan con puntos suspensivos: “…A lo mejor el error está en pensar en que esto es el ocaso, cuando en realidad es la aurora…”

domingo, 29 de marzo de 2015

Bertolt Brecht

Miguel Hernández


"Siento todas mis ataduras"

Una carta inédita de Miguel Hernández refleja su angustia en la cárcel antes de morir

Una carta de Miguel Hernández es una joya. Más si en ella palpita el sentimiento de desazón, hartazgo y escasa confianza en el futuro que sintió el poeta en la cárcel de Ocaña, 10 meses antes de morir en marzo de 1942. Por eso, el descubrimiento de una misiva del escritor a su amigo Carlos Rodríguez Spiteri tiene más que un valor simbólico. Ha sido Eutimio Martín, que publicará una biografía sobre el autor en 2010 -centenario de su nacimiento-, quien ha descubierto el documento. "Sus cartas son escasísimas y casi todas las escribe para pedir cosas prácticas. En ésta se comprueba el desaliento que sufre en la cárcel, su falta de esperanza", según Martín.
El poeta compartió durante años principios falangistas con Ramón Sijé

La carta va dirigida al poeta Rodríguez Spiteri, alguien muy cercano a él. "Si conocemos sólo 437 cartas y 316 van dirigidas a Josefina Manresa, su mujer, este hombre con 10 correspondencias es la tercera persona, después de José María de Cossío, con quien más relación mantuvo".Es uno de los aspectos que este estudioso analizará a fondo en Miguel Hernández. Oficio de poeta, como se titula la biografía que publicará Aguilar. Dará mucho que hablar. En ella, Martín desmonta mitos y leyendas sobre uno de los símbolos de la represión franquista. "Cuando va a cumplirse un siglo de su nacimiento conviene que lo confrontemos con la realidad y lo alejemos del símbolo".
De ahí su trato de confianza desalentada, en la que además de recibir la noticia del nuevo libro de Spitieri, Los reinos de secreta esperanza, y comentarlo, Hernández deja entrever su desesperación: "Siento todas mis ataduras y mi poca, mi escasísima posibilidad de movimiento. Sólo puedo moverme en un patio que tengo más recorrido que el día...".
Según su biógrafo, cuando el poeta escribe cartas lo hace para pedir. "Para que ayuden a Josefina, para que atiendan a su hijo, cosas así, de ese tono son las que mantiene con Vicente Aleixandre o Cossío, para quien trabajó y cuyo contenido es muy profesional".
Eso sin hablar de la frialdad que desprende el tratamiento a sus hermanos y a su padre, con quien mantuvo una relación tormentosa. Aquel hombre no sólo le arrancó del colegio para que cuidara cabras en el campo, sino que jamás le perdonó haberse alistado en el bando republicano, algo que hizo en septiembre de 1936. La crudeza de la reacción del padre de Hernández al conocer su muerte tiene asombrado a su biógrafo. "Él se lo había buscado", cuenta Martín que dijo.
Pero las sombras sin resolver en la vida y la biografía del poeta venían de antes. No fue Miguel Hernández un republicano convencido desde siempre. Junto a Ramón Sijé vivió su iniciación en la poesía y un cierto amamantamiento ideológico. A él dedica una famosa Elegía tras su muerte. Durante años compartieron principios falangistas. "Sé que esto es muy delicado, pero la relación de Miguel Hernández con esos círculos es clara. A Sijé, le llega a dedicar un libro como jefe y todos sabemos lo que en ese ámbito significa", cuenta Martín. El falangismo del poeta estaba muy centrado en el medio rural. "Era un fascismo eucarístico. En vez del yugo y las flechas, utilizaban un racimo de uvas y espigas de trigo. Llega a publicar en una revista que se llama El gallo en crisis".
Su vida en Madrid supone una conversión vertiginosa. "Sobre todo lo demuestra en un poema, Sonreídme". Allí entra en contacto con los grupos poéticos. Tras publicar El rayo que no cesa, se convierte en una figura. Extraña y ajena al glamour del exclusivo tinglado lírico, donde miraban por encima del hombro a un cabrero, pero una figura al fin y al cabo. "Incluso le saca partido a esa imagen campesina, le daba personalidad", añade el investigador.
No tarda en virar ideológicamente. Fue hacia el año 1935. "Se relaciona mucho con la mujer de Pablo Neruda, Delia del Carril, y con un revolucionario argentino, Raúl González Muñón". Además, empieza a colaborar con las Misiones Pedagógicas de la Institución Libre de Enseñanza. La guerra acelera su compromiso. Un compromiso que no rompe jamás. "Habría salido de la cárcel con cualquier gesto. Pero supo que en aquella España no iba a poder desarrollar su vocación. Que no había espacio para su oficio de poeta. Y prefirió morir...".

A su amigo Carlos Rodríguez Spitieri

- "Querido Carlos: con gran sorpresa, he recibido ese libro tuyo del 38, cuando las circunstancias eran muy otras para todos. Son poemas esos tuyos impregnados de la enrarecida atmósfera que respirabas, llenos de la angustia y la esperanza de tu juventud. Me alegran ciertos versos, donde la ternura halla su forma de expresión más inspirada. El libro, en total, está lleno de ese aliento que hace patente a un poeta. Vicente te habrá dicho mucho, y yo prefiero aguardar una ocasión para decirte todo cuanto pienso de este libro, que tú consideras un poco lejano. Veo que viajas, y cuando miro que tu carta viene de Toledo, siento todas mis ataduras y mi poca, mi escasísima posibilidad de movimiento. Sólo puedo moverme en un patio, que tengo más recorrido que el día. Dime más de tu actividad poética. Yo no hago nada por hoy, mañana veremos qué se hace. Vivo, me limito a vivir una vida de preso con todas sus consecuencias. Te abrazo y te prometo darte a conocer mi hijo".

viernes, 27 de marzo de 2015

Roy Sullivan


Lightning strikes: A man hit seven times

 August 15, 2013

Dickey Baker is a son of the Shenandoahs: born, raised and firmly rooted. He talks country-slow, as if each sentence is
a chess move requiring careful deliberation. “It’s a pretty place,” he says of the verdant meadows and mountains that surround him. “I’ve left a few times but always come back.”
Baker — a hefty man with a ruddy complexion and pompadour gone gray — has been a Shenandoah National Park maintenance worker for 43 years. He walks to the rear of a cabin at the Skyland campground and gazes across the ruffled landscape he loves. Page Valley tosses and turns directly below. It’s a beautiful late May day, but Baker describes for me how very different things can be when thick clouds barrel in, cannon shots of thunder resound, and lightning fractures black skies. He flashes back to a tumultuous afternoon some 20 years ago.
“I was painting the bedroom in that house,” he says, nodding toward the cabin next door. “I got to be honest with you. I laid on the floor between two beds. That storm actually scared me comin’ up the mountain that day.”
Instead, a crack of lightning took out an oak tree by the maintenance shed just down the road.
I’ve come to talk with Dickey Baker about the legacy of Lightning Man. When Baker was a teenage employee, he crossed paths with Roy Sullivan, who died 30 years ago and undoubtedly is the most famous ranger in the history of Shenandoah National Park, if not every national park.
Baker saw the tan ranger hat that Sullivan kept in his truck as a souvenir. It had two scorched holes where a lightning bolt supposedly entered and exited. “He used to haul it around with him,” recalls Baker, who also saw Sullivan’s wristwatch that got toasted black by another bolt.
Forty-one years after his debut in the “Guinness Book of World Records,” Ranger Roy Sullivan continues to hold the dubious distinction of being struck by lightning more than any known person. Not twice. Not three times.
Seven times.
That’ll attract attention. In the early 1970s, Sullivan did an interview with expat British broadcaster David Frost and appeared on the quiz show “To Tell the Truth.” In 1980, Sullivan was featured in an episode of the TV series “That’s Incredible.” More recently, Discover magazine (2008) included him on its list of memorable survivors, along with the Soviet World War II pilot who bailed out of his plane at 22,000 feet without a parachute and the hapless sailor who endured being adrift at sea for 76 days in a five-foot raft. The Web site Cracked.com (2009) selected Sullivan as one of the seven “Most Bizarrely Unlucky People Who Ever Lived.” (Tsutomu Yamaguchi was named most unlucky, having been at ground zero when atomic bombs fell on both Hiroshima and Nagasaki.) In 2010 Sullivan’s misadventures were the basis of a humorous South African TV commercial for, of all things, energy-saving milk cartons. His birth-chart reading is posted on AstrologyWeekly .com in the heady company of Elvis Presley, Bill Clinton and Leonardo da Vinci.
And surely he has to be the only National Park Service ranger ever immortalized in song. A Florida fringe band called I Hate Myself recorded “Roy Sullivan, By Lightning Loved” in the mid-1990s. It did not become a cult classic, perhaps because of convoluted lyrics such as this:
Am I graced or grounded?
Blessed or burnt to crisp?
Through this mud, we’re impounded
Is this bliss?
We humans yearn for order and structure, taking comfort in whatever certainties can be found in a seemingly chaotic universe. But life misbehaves. What sense can be made of its twists and turns? Did Roy Sullivan have an explanation for his epic misfortune? Why him? Can the fickle finger of fate really be that preposterously unfair?
4.15 in 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,
000,000,000,000
— The odds of somebody being struck by lightning seven times
Dickey Baker points me toward an unmarked trail about 100 yards away. That’s where the Sullivan saga begins. Twenty-five minutes of hiking mildly undulating terrain brings me to Millers Head overlook and what remains of a fire tower; a 15-foot-by-15-foot stone foundation topped by a concrete platform. Back in the day, the tower afforded a panoramic glimpse of Page Valley. This was Sullivan’s perch during a vicious storm that pounded Shenandoah National Park in April 1942. Unfortunately for Sullivan, lightning rods had yet to be installed.
“It was hit seven or eight times, and fire was jumping all over the place,” Sullivan told a reporter some 30 years later, reliving the moment.
He decided to make a run for it.
Bad idea.
“I got just a few feet away from the tower, and then, blam!”
Lightning burned a half-inch stripe down Sullivan’s right leg and demolished the nail on his big toe. Blood spurted from his foot, draining through a hole ripped in his boot sole.
Strike One! Only six more to go.
A George Washington University statistics professor once calculated that the odds of somebody being whacked by lightning seven times is 4.15 in 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.
That’s a lot of zeros. And they don’t come close to putting the Roy Sullivan story in proper perspective.
Lightning strikes are text messages from Mother Nature: fast, furious and frequent reminders of who’s boss. The typical bolt lasts less than a half second. It is 1 to 6 inches in diameter, spans nearly five miles, and can pack a punch of 100 million volts. Earth gets peppered billions of times a year, with lightning killing an estimated 24,000 people annually. Roughly 40 of those victims will be Americans. Raw, unrestrained power of that magnitude captures the imagination. Dozens of ancient societies conjured up mythic figures who brandished lightning bolts. The Norse had Thor. The Egyptians, Typhon. The Chinese, Lei Tsu. The Greeks, Zeus. Across cultures lightning became regarded as an instrument of a vengeful God, His joke’s-on-you way of settling scores with sinners.
Benjamin Franklin broke the spell of what John Friedman, author of “Out of the Blue: A History of Lightning,” calls “theological meteorology.” In June 1752, Franklin conducted his kite-flying experiment, proving that lightning was nothing more than a gigantic electrical charge and, therefore, inexorably drawn to the metal key dangling on his kite string. As brilliant as Franklin could be, he neglected to patent his invention. Poor Ben. By 1870 some 10,000 salesmen were hawking lightning rods in the United States, according to Friedman’s book.
Post-Franklin scientists studied lightning and, over the centuries, discovered that the phenomenon amounts to a gigantic floating battery. Cumulonimbus clouds reach heights of eight miles, with temperatures varying as much as 100 degrees within. Rain, sleet and hail are produced simultaneously. High winds whip everything into an unstable stew. On a subatomic level, agitated particles collide like bumper cars. Some particles become negatively charged, others positively. As a rule, the positive particles rise toward the top of the cloud. Negative ones sink to the bottom. The two extremes act like polar-opposite terminals of a battery. When electrical transference occurs between them, a visible flash results. Lightning!
About 90 percent of lightning is inter-cloud fireworks that never reach the ground. The other 10 percent — what we see and run from — takes place on a grander scale. Lightning shoots downward (on occasion upward, if the cloud happens to be more positively charged than the ground) to achieve circuit neutrality. Thunder is owed to the lightning flash giving off millions of volts of electricity, which superheats the air to more than 50,000 degrees, five times the temperature of the sun.
Most people are struck nowhere near the mother cloud. At NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va., the protocol is for pilots to stay 70 nautical miles away from the periphery of a storm. For good reason. Lightning wreaks havoc with the body’s delicate wiring. Mary Ann Cooper, professor emeritus of emergency medicine at the University of Illinois at Chicago, has studied strike survivors for three decades. “It causes chronic pain and causes brain-injury, post-concussion-type symptoms,” she says. “You and I can filter out distractions and still focus. One of the things we see with lightning and electric[-shock] patients is that ability is scraped off.”
Death by cardiac arrest is the worst scenario. Other potential effects run a wide and unpredictable gamut. Consider these injury reports filed by members of Lightning Strike and Electric Shock Survivors, a North Carolina-based support group that held its annual meeting recently in Pigeon Forge, Tenn. Cheryl, hit while phoning her husband to warn him about a storm: petit mal seizures. Mike, hit while golfing: completely paralyzed but slowly recovering. Rachel, hit once indoors, once outdoors: no lasting effects. Geneva, hit once indoors, once outdoors: headaches, chronic pain, digestive problems, fatigue, sensitivity to barometric pressure. Angela, hit three times: severe neuropathy, chronic pain, digestive problems, aphasia, apraxia, frontal lobe damage, short-term memory loss and post-traumatic stress disorder.
Then there are the Twilight Zone cases such as Nina Lazzeroni, an Ohio woman who turned into a walking circuit breaker after being struck in 1995. Lights inexplicably flick off when she passes street lamps, billboards and parking lots. As she told author John Friedman, “They come back on after I leave the area and turn off again if I return.”
Florida is the lightning capital of the country, recording 468 deaths between 1959 and 2012, according to National Weather Service data. Texas is a distant second with 215. Maryland reported 126 fatalities and the District only five. Virginia had 66, tied for 26th place with Kansas. Yes, the “Spark Ranger” had a job that put him at greater-than-average risk, but current and former Shenandoah National Park staff can’t think of a visitor or a ranger struck in the past 17 years, and probably much longer.
The collective knowledge about odds-beating, death-defying Roy Sullivan appears to be spread thin, even among those in the know. He preceded the science community’s interest. “None of us working in lightning ever met him,” Cooper says. NASA engineer Bruce Fisher has been on hundreds of research flights through the wildest of thunderstorms but can offer only this tidbit about Sullivan: “I heard he had lightning rods on his four-poster bed.”
Just as with Dickey Baker, Sullivan’s existence was circumscribed by the Blue Ridge Mountains — the difference being Sullivan never ventured into the wider world. He was born in February 1912 in Greene County, the fourth of Arthur and Ida Bell Shifflett Sullivan’s 11 children. The Sullivans and Shiffletts were well-established mountain families. They hacked a living from the soil and kept their distance from genteel society.
Like many “hollow folk,” as academics dubbed mountain inhabitants, Roy Sullivan didn’t graduate from high school. Instead, he got a thorough grounding in the outdoors, hiking the ridges and woods around Simmons Gap. He claimed to have once shot 30 rabbits in a single day as a boy, selling them for 25 cents a head. In his early 20s, Sullivan joined the Civilian Conservation Corps. It had just started the dirty work of building Skyline Drive and Shenandoah National Park. Part of his job entailed demolishing the homes of neighbors forced to relocate so the forests could be returned to pristine condition.
Sullivan hired on with the park’s fire patrol in 1940. Forest Service ranger Franklin Taylor, who recalls fighting one fire in which “Mr. Roy” — as Taylor still respectfully refers to him — advised the crew, “If a storm comes up, you all get away from me.” Sullivan later became one of three rangers responsible for monitoring the 40-mile stretch from Swift Run Gap to Waynesboro, the southern terminus of Shenandoah National Park. William Nichols supervised him for five years. “He was uneducated but a very intelligent man,” Nichols says. “He loved telling a story. In a word, he was a character.” But a gracious one. Sullivan readily shared his practical expertise with colleagues who held college degrees; he was able to easily identify assorted trees, even in the dead of winter, when they’d been stripped of their leaves.
Sullivan may have related to trees better than he did women. He had four wives. It’s unclear if all those unions were legally consummated, but genealogy records indicate that in 1932, at age 20, he took the hand of Martha Herring. They had a son, Roy Jr., who died in 1996. On the heels of Martha came Madeline Shifflett (1943) and Vinda Blackwell (1953). In March 1962, Sullivan married Patricia Morris, an Augusta County girl. She was 19. He was 50. Tongues wagged, especially when they had three children.
Says Frank Deckert, who was a Shenandoah park ranger from 1968 to 1971: “We used to kid him that he’d get recharged with the lightning strikes and have another kid.”
After his harrowing experience at Millers Head fire tower, Roy Sullivan enjoyed 27 years of uneventful skies. That streak ended in July 1969 near milepost 97 on Skyline Drive. It was rainy but sticky-hot. He was driving in the southbound lane, negotiating tight S-curves, when lightning blasted two trees on that side of the road, then deflected into the northbound lane and took out a third. In between, the bolt passed through the open windows of Sullivan’s truck. His wristwatch got cooked, his eyebrows fried. Any hair not protected by his hat was burned off. Sullivan lost consciousness, and the truck rolled to the lip of a deep ditch.
Strike Three occurred exactly one year later: July 1970. Pat and Roy Sullivan were living in a house trailer on the western fringe of the park at Sawmill Run. Roy was tending his garden one afternoon. Lightning suddenly streaked out of a relatively clear sky, pulverizing a power transformer near the trailer, then smashing into his left shoulder and sending him airborne. A month later Pat got dinged, for the first and only time, while she was standing in the front yard.
Following in Sullivan’s electrified footsteps, I’m uncertain if there’s a pattern developing. Does each strike get progressively more dramatic and harder to swallow? Or am I being city-slicker cynical? There’s no denying, however, that Strike Four takes the Sullivan narrative to a new level.
A gentle rain fell on April 16, 1972. The Spark Ranger was in a small guardhouse atop Loft Mountain, registering carloads of visitors who were arriving at the campground. Not so much as a coo of thunder riffled the air. Then … KABOOM! Lightning annihilated a fuse box inside the guardhouse. “The fire was bouncing around inside the station, and when my ears stopped ringing, I heard something sizzling,” Sullivan told a Washington Post reporter who contacted him a week later. “It was my hair on fire.”
Sullivan stuck his head in the sink, but it wouldn’t fit under the spigot. He used wet paper towels to extinguish the hair fire and drove to Waynesboro Community Hospital. He lamented that he “tried to lead a good life,” but God seemed hell-bent on barbecuing him. He also gave The Post a mini scoop. While cutting wheat as a kid, a lightning bolt had zapped his scythe, setting the field ablaze.
Strike Four went global, capturing the attention of Ross and Norris McWhirter, the British twins who co-edited the “Guinness Book of World Records,” the Bible of oddball superlatives. The 1972 edition went to press with Sullivan heralded as the “only living man to be struck by lightning four times.”
The success of the Guinness franchise largely hinges on credibility. It’s considered the go-to source for confirming, say, the world’s heaviest tumor or the fastest time pogo-sticking to the top of Mount Fuji. Ross and Norris McWhirter reputedly were sticklers for facts. Within a year they had to update Sullivan’s entry. On Aug. 7, 1973, he racked up Strike Five. The precise location is lost to history. The Guinness publishing company changed hands a half-dozen times, and the Sullivan files got lost in all the corporate shuffling. The National Park Service kept no documentation.
Details about Strike Five come from an account Sullivan gave three weeks later. He was driving his truck on Skyline Drive, trying to outrace a storm. Once he got out of range, he stopped to have a look. Apparently he didn’t drive far enough. “I actually saw the lightning shoot out of the cloud this time,” he said, “and it was coming straight for me.”
Bull’s-eye! This was a head shot that ignited another hair fire and sent Sullivan pinwheeling. The flash funneled down his left arm and leg, “knocking off my shoe but not untying the lace.” He talked openly about the cosmic ramifications of these brushes with death. He’d dreamed about this strike in advance, just as he did Strike Four. Only now there was a follow-up dream, which he interpreted as signifying the spell had been broken: no more lightning strikes.
“God spared me for some good purpose,” declared Sullivan, refusing to reveal exactly what that purpose was: “It’s between God and me, and nobody but us will ever know.”
Apparently God changed His plan. On June 5, 1976, Sullivan got bopped for the sixth time. He’d been walking alone on Sawmill Shelter Trail, about a mile from where Strike Two found him in 1969. Enough already! Sullivan retired from the Park Service five months later. He and Pat moved to a plot of land in an unincorporated town just north of Waynesboro that seemed meant for him. It’s called Dooms.
They parked their house trailer, and Roy spared no expense on lightning rods. He never equipped the four-poster bed, but he did affix them to all four corners of his trailer. He fastened more rods to the TV antenna, electric meter and six of the tallest trees. Each was made of heavy-gauge copper wire and sunk seven feet in the ground.
He should’ve put a lightning rod on his head.
On June 25, 1977, Sullivan was trout fishing when he smelled sulphur and felt the hair bristle on his arms. Seconds later, he took another shot in the coconut, pitching him into the water. His hair got singed, and he sustained burns to his chest and stomach, plus hearing loss in one ear. Holes were burned in his T-shirt and underwear. Sullivan pulled himself together and scrambled to his car, whereupon he bumped into a hungry black bear that swiped his lunch and the three trout on his line. He drove home in a daze.
Pat took him to the hospital, where a cub reporter for the Waynesboro News Virginian interviewed him. Sullivan described how he shooed away the bear by smacking it in the snout with a tree branch, claiming that was the 22nd bear attack he’d fought off (another Guinness record?). “Some people are allergic to flowers,” Sullivan mused, “but I’m allergic to lightning. It’s funny stuff.”
In another interview that fall he speculated “some chemical, some mineral” in his body made him super susceptible to lightning. “I have a feeling,” he added, “I’m going to be struck again someday.”
That premonition came true in the early morning hours of Sept. 28, 1983. Only lightning didn’t strike Roy Sullivan. Lying in bed next to his wife, he pressed a .22-caliber pistol to his right ear and pulled the trigger.
I check into a motel in Waynesboro and ask Franny, the desk clerk, if she knows anything about Roy Sullivan. Nope. However, she does know a woman who got slammed by lightning when she was about 17. “Turned her hair snow white,” Franny says. “It lost all its pigmentation. ‘It was like I saw a ghost’ is how she explained it to her kids.”
Depression is a more common side effect. Did Sullivan pay a steep psychological price for his ordeal? That, of course, presumes the Human Lightning Rod was a straight talker and not the Human Lying Rod. Nobody witnessed any of Sullivan’s seven strikes. Not his wife. Not a fellow ranger. And not a peep out of an attending physician. On the other hand, newspaper articles do credit his family doctor and Park Superintendent R. Taylor Hoskins with verifying his injuries, if not the actual strikes themselves. “My father was very conservative,” says R. Taylor Hoskins Jr. “He never would have stuck his neck out if he didn’t have fairly credible information.”
I hit the streets of Waynesboro in search of clarity. At Weasie’s Kitchen, where locals flock for breakfast, I take a seat by a man who mounted a deer head for Sullivan’s youngest son, Bobby. Decent guy, he says. A contractor. I’d already left multiple phone messages for Bobby, sister Kathy and older brother Tim. All to no avail. At Weasie’s, I get directions to Bobby’s house. He inherited his father’s old place in Dooms. The trailer has been replaced by a prefab home.
Warm and cozy it’s not.
A huge scarlet flag adorned with the word “REDNECK” hangs loosely from a pole in the front yard. A Confederate battle flag fills the front window in lieu of curtains. I walk briskly up the driveway, past the barbecue grill, past this sign tacked to a tree: “No Trespassing! Violators will be shot. Survivors will be shot again.” I knock on the door. Inside, country music plays on the radio. I keep knocking. Music keeps playing. I stick a note in Bobby’s mailbox but never hear from him.
In newspaper clips Roy Sullivan comes off as an affable, slightly befuddled “good ol’ country boy,” as somebody characterized him for me. Did he get carried away with his lightning stories? Five grizzled men in baseball caps dawdle outside a 7-Eleven in the town adjacent to Dooms. They’re sipping coffee and jawing in the midday heat. “There’s some skepticism,” one fellow admits. His pal Larry — I can’t drag a full name out of any of these guys — says he knows why Sullivan was such an easy target: “He had a plate in his head. Pat’s sister’s husband told me that.”
Well, another voice pipes up, if that’s true, what about the lightning bolt that zipped straight through the windows of Roy’s vehicle? “Why didn’t it attack the metal in his car?”
Hmmm.
Larry suggests I might get answers from Pat’s sister, who lives just down the highway. I find Dee Morris and husband Ronny Roadcap lounging in patio chairs behind their white clapboard house. Dee confirms that her sister did get stung by lightning at Sawmill Run. Roy was gone that day. “She went out to pick up the kids’ toys. She didn’t even see a storm coming up.”
They both snicker at this notion that Roy was a marked man because he had a metal plate in his head. Nonsense. “You know how people like to talk, especially around here,” Ronny says.
Funny thing, forest ranger Franklin Taylor also remembers “Mr. Roy” mentioning he had a metal plate in his head. But that doesn’t entirely square with what Sullivan told the News Virginian after Strike Seven. “I have a metal plate in my right ankle from when I broke it years ago,” he said. “That plate got hot, I’ll tell you.”
Roy Sullivan belonged to Shenandoah Heights Baptist Church, where 83-year-old Bob Campbell worships. I give him a call. He didn’t know Sullivan well, but Campbell says something that gives me a start, something that his wife overhears and causes her to cluck and playfully shush him up.
“I did hear one rumor that lightning couldn’t kill him. But his wife’s .22 did.”
We are all soap operas. There are no simple lives, not even those led by the simplest of men. Roy Sullivan’s lightning encounters do defy logic. Still, it’s hard to imagine him taking a blowtorch to his hair or cutting burn holes in his underwear. Reed Engle, a retired National Park Service historian, has full faith in those Guinness records. “The lightning happened, and it was well documented,” he declares.
A ranger who transported Sullivan to the hospital once is wary. “My gut feeling,” the ranger says, “is he was struck probably several times. I think his mental health had been failing some. They started getting more difficult to believe. I think as the notoriety grew, Roy liked the notoriety.”
I presume that NASA engineer Bruce Fisher will be a vocal critic. Not so. “I can believe it,” he says, “because he was out in the open. He’s exposed, and he’s got metal on him, probably carrying a gun and a badge.”
I’m curious what survivors of multiple lightning strikes make of Sullivan. They’ve been there, felt that. Wayne Cottrill, retired from Fairfax County Parks Authority in 1998. He got lit up three times between 1969 and 1971. All were indirect side strikes; all taking place while he was managing boat rentals. He experienced temporary paralysis and had hair burned off his arms. “I’ve always been fascinated by Roy Sullivan,” Cottrill says. “Maybe sometimes he made things up. Who knows?”
I think his mental health had been failing some. They started getting more difficult to believe. I think as the notoriety grew, Roy liked the notoriety.”
A ranger who once took Sullivan to the hospital
Bob Edwards of Charlotte works as a nuclear power plant mechanic and rigger. He’s 52 and a three-time lightning victim dogged by post-traumatic stress disorder. He’s contemptuous of South Carolinian Melvin Roberts, who professes to have been hit seven times but has not cracked the Guinness record book. (One reason could be that Melvin insists he now “sees dead people.”) Edwards reserves judgment on Sullivan but can’t conceive a body withstanding seven jolts of lightning.
“Each time I was hit, I was out of it,” Edwards says. “I was on the ground convulsing. I was curled up in a fetal position. I’m a hard-core redneck, but when a storm comes I run like a silly-a-- girl and get in the house.”
Media and Internet scuttlebutt has it that Sullivan killed himself because of a broken heart, the implication being that this was a devoted husband who proved to be as luckless in love as he was with lightning. But there are whispers of a darker side, thoughts only shared off-the-record and cryptically phrased. Sullivan left behind an extended family large enough to accommodate a few conspiracy theorists. One relative unloads a lot of innuendo but refuses to be specific. “I know the man. I know his reputation. I know people who could tell you what he was really like.” Beyond that, those lips stay stubbornly sealed.
Another conspiracist contends that Pat and Roy had “a rough marriage”; rough enough that Sullivan’s younger sister, Ruth — who passed away in June at age 92 — believed to her dying day that Pat murdered him.
The facts of the case invite speculation. The Waynesboro first-aid squad transported Roy Sullivan from his home to the hospital at 9 a.m. on Monday, Sept. 28, 1983. He was pronounced dead on arrival. His two sons provided information to news reporters. Tim was then 13; Bobby, only 10. They quoted their mother as saying the shooting took place at approximately 3 in the morning but went unnoticed for hours.
Pat was in bed next to her husband. Why didn’t the gunshot rouse her? Randy Fisher, now Augusta County sheriff, recalls being dispatched to the scene that morning. He found Sullivan bleeding from a single .22 bullet to the head, “a contact wound through a pillow.”
There were no witnesses, not even Pat Sullivan.
“She was a very sound sleeper,” Fisher says. “The speculation on her part was that he’d been very depressed. She woke up in bed, and he was dead.”
Time passed, and rumors bubbled to the surface. Both Fisher and Officer Philip Broadfoot, today chief of police in Danville, caught wind of them. “The family doesn’t want it to be suicide. It’s hard for people to accept,” Broadfoot says. “You’ve got to put a lot of faith and trust in folks responding to the scene. If it hadn’t been Roy Sullivan who’d been struck by lightning seven times, I don’t think we’d be having this conversation.”
Edgewood Cemetery occupies what appears to be a converted cornfield across the dusty road from a lonesome country church. The headstones stand in rows straight and tall, as if ready for harvesting. A townie joked that I should look for the gravesite with charred grass on top.
A deer leaping over a log is etched into the granite surface of Roy Sullivan’s marker. Pat died in 2002. She’s buried about 10 feet to his right. Wedged between them is the tiny grave of their grandson, an unquestionably unlucky soul who lived for all of one day in December 1995.
Researchers marvel at the complexity of lightning storms. They’ve learned a lot but are still puzzled by the physics of how air ionizes and reconfigures or exactly how a strike affects the body’s chemistry. Yet nature at its spectacular, mysterious best is no match for what goes on daily inside a person’s head and heart. How much do we know about the storm clouds and blue skies within any of us?
The Human Lightning Rod never divulged the deeper purpose he claimed to have discerned in his star-crossed life. If he was, indeed, singled out in a peculiar otherworldly way, somebody seems to have concluded it was for the best. Here’s what is chiseled on Roy Sullivan’s headstone. “We loved you, but God loved you more.” 
Tom Dunkel is a freelance writer and the author of “Color Blind: The Forgotten Team That Broke Baseball’s Color Line.” His last story for the Magazine was about bounty hunters. To comment on this story, e-mail wpmagazine@washpost.com. Eddy Palanzo contributed to this report.

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