I was the bearer of bad tidings to Wonko today, as I had heard on NPR that both Johnny Cash and John Ritter were dead. I knew that Wonko liked John Ritter from discussion of his turn on Buffy. Here’s a bit of Wonko’s response:

These are people whose names we’ve grown up hearing, or who we’ve grown up watching or listening to. I mean, Obi-Wan Kenobi is dead. Dr. McCoy is dead. Bob Hope, Frank Sinatra, Charles Bronson, Mel Blanc, and now Johnny Cash and, totally out of the blue, John Ritter. Darth Vader has arthritis and his health is failing. The Godfather basically can’t do anything anymore because his mind and body have deteriorated so much. Stanley Kubrick died years ago after making his worst movie ever.

For some reason I never thought these people would die. They’re supposed to be constants. It’s not fair.

I realized as I read this that this simply isn’t true for me. While hearing people I’ve admired or appreciated have died makes me sad, it doesn’t give me that feeling of destabilization—a feeling I know well, having lost two grandparents. (As a side note, I think grandparents are part of the foundation and grounding of your world, and losing them is profoundly shaking.) What disturbs me more is the death of authors. I cried out in shock and pain when I heard that Isaac Asimov died (and my fifth grade class laughed at me for it), and I have regular attacks of dread on behalf of Lloyd Alexander, who is getting fairly old.

At first, I considered that perhaps Wonko is more immersed in popular culture than I am - but, I am The Fangirl, so that is not it. Perhaps, thunk I, Wonko’s attachment to movies affects his perception. This is quite possible, but then I thought of something more intriguing. A movie is a time capsule. Short of Greedo shooting first, it is an immutable pocket of fantasy. The ‘reality’ of that moment - the people, props, and places—is fleeting, and so they occupy a different place in my perception of time and the universe. It does not really surprise me, even though it saddens me, that Alec Guinness is dead, any more than it surprises me that Drew Barrymore is no longer osh-koshing it about in pigtails. A movie is a moment.

A book - and I stray near to literary theory here, though I will not cross the line and condemn this post to a long philosophical discussion with my husband - is a conversation. You inform the words on the page far more than you inform the images on a TV screen. I read Taran Wanderer and find it new each time. When I read Gone with the Wind in elementary school, I thought Scarlett was really ill-used by the others in the story, and was quite admirable. When I read it in high school, I thought she was a spoiled, vicious brat and Melanie was worth a dozen of her. You notice nuances or bring new moods to the reading of a book, so that the volume, that chunk chiselled out of an author’s brain, lives and speaks differently each time. How odd, then, to put down a living book and hear that the author with whom you’ve been interacting has gone.

Not only that, but whilst the author lives, the conversation can continue, carried through another book and another. When he or she has died, all you have to sift through are the library’s old volumes. The tree is still there, but you know it will never bear fruit again.