Survived another Secret Santa having given a fitting gift to another and having received something nice in return. Funnily enough, my mother-in-law pulled my name for gift giving — she did me a solid buying a collection of essays and the Complete Works of Alvaro de Campos, all from New Directions Publishing. The food, company, and setting were all good, so all-in-all not a bad night out.

Was thinking (for no particular reason) about the tricky act of hagiography in the pursuit of humanism. Well, not for no reason: I began Clive James’s Cultural Amnesia, a collection of around 100 essays of leading cultural/political/historical figures of the 19th and 20th Centuries. Why it matters has to do with James’s willingness to place the faults of even the most revered figures in the spotlight. Walter Benjamin, a thinker lauded for apparent ability to transcend all thoughts into the most abstract level of theory and an intellectual driven to suicide by Nazism’s sundering of Europe, comes in for a humbling at having written so obtusely that everything he did more-or-less became nonsense. You hate to mock those regarded as leading lights for human failures, but we must.

It is only through critical examination of our heroes that we can understand them to be mortal. If they are mortal, they are like us. And if they are like us, then that means we can strive to follow in their footsteps. To take the causes they fought for or represented as something even more real and attainable because those most closely associated with it were flawed individuals like the rest of us. Exceptional, yes, but borne of the same materials we all hail from. Any tendency to beatify others should be rejected outright — the challenge of following in the footsteps of sainthood is too great for the average person. We must be proud of those we deem worthy of our esteem while remaining cognizant of their flesh and blood. Through this, we advance the cause of humanity.