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It's not just that the best and brightest are leaving the country in droves for other shores. It's that the best and brightest are leaving this wretched vale of tears in droves forever. This year has been especially cruel in depleting our ranks of truly distinguished men and women. Doubly so because nearly all of them have come from the arts, the noblest of professions. And the only exception was no mean writer himself. We're just past the first half of this year, and already we've suffered six epic losses. Early this year, we lost two musical giants in Lucio San Pedro and Levi Celerio, composer and lyricist respectively. Then only last month, we lost Doreen Fernandez and Larry Alcala, literary critic and cartoonist respectively. And now Franz Arcellana and Boni Gillego. It's not just that they're going in twos, it's also quite uncannily that they're going in pairs - that is, as representatives of a particular facet of life, cultural or otherwise. San Pedro and Celerio were musical icons, and had in fact collaborated on one song, "Sa Ugoy ng Duyan." Fernandez and Alcala were standouts in popular culture, in the best sense of the term, "popular." Doreen wasn't just a literature professor, she was also a well-read food writer, the one flowing into the other like (good) wine. And Alcala, well, you can't have a bigger icon of popular culture than he. Boni and Franz, too, had more in common than that, equally uncannily, as I learned during Boni's wake, they shared the same final hours on earth on the same spot of earth. They had adjacent units at the National Kidney and Transplant Institute. Both represent something that is fast disappearing from our life today. It is more than Old World charm, though they had plenty of it. It is even more than a dedication to craft or profession. It is a dedication to truth and beauty. It is a passionate embracing of life. The people who spoke at Franz's wake were lush in their praise of his writing and teaching. And they were right. Franz was a gifted writer and a brilliant teacher, if you reckon both as the power to inspire and touch people. How well-and how long-he did that you see in the diversity of the crowd that came to his wake: from struggling writer to national artist, from student to professor, from callow youth to yellowed contemporaries, or such of them as were still around to mourn him. Throughout his 85 years on earth, he gave everyone he met something of himself, he left everyone who came within the ambit of his light some glow of it. And they all came in remembrance of it, thanking him for it. If the measure of a human life is not how long it is lived but how well it is lived, then you have sheer plenitude here. If the weight of a life is not how much it occupies but how much it leaves behind, then we have sheer monument here. I myself think the one great and lasting thing Franz has done for all of us has been to keep the spirit of writing alive in this country. In all that writing signifies. For those who write, a level of discipline and pride and aspiration that it entails. Someone once told Andres Segovia after a concert, "I'd give my life to be able to play like that." Segovia answered, "I have." Franz might have said the same thing to those who told him they'd give their lives to be able to touch people like that. For those who read what others write, a shock of realization that literature is not just a subject you pass, "pasang awa" (barely passing) or with flying colors, it is not something you pass the time with, for diversion or amusement, it is something you embrace, like a child or lover. It is not something you consume and spit out to impress and look erudite, it is something you breathe into your soul, like a gaseous incandescence. Literature is not something that makes you win "Game na Game," it is something that stokes you to gentleness and sparks you into a generosity of spirit. Franz's very life was his masterpiece, his most lasting lesson to his students who are all of us. He lived as he wrote, he lived as he taught. So did Bonifacio Gillego, who is the only non-artist here but only in the technical sense of the term. His life was one dazzling work of art, dedicated to exposing evil where it lurked, dedicated to revealing good where nobody thought to find it. And he did so in language that would have made many writers weep. He was no mean writer himself, as I said, and that owed as much to talent as to truth being known to make even the mute eloquent. He was the one who exposed Ferdinand Marcos' medals as fake, researching in America even while keeping body and soul together doing odd jobs, among them as security guard. Franz unearthed the truth that lay beneath the seeming fiction, Boni exposed the fiction that lay behind the seeming truth. It was his exposes that finally felled martial law, hewing down the myth upon which the fiction lay. Without it, Marcos might never have cut, and cut cleanly. But if Boni was uncompromising about principle during Marcos' time, he was uncompromising about principle after Marcos' time, refusing to be silent in the face of iniquity-and consequently falling out of grace with the government he helped spawn. He lived a simple life, finding boundless reward in the joy his labors brought to him, a fact his constituents in Sorsogon province appreciated enough to keep sending him again and again to Congress. If the measure of life is not the amount of money one amasses but the wealth of wisdom one bequeaths to others, then here is riches beyond compare. If the weight of life is not the power one uses to force others to submit but the power one wields to free others, then here is an explosion of life itself. Here lie two good men. We cannot have a bigger loss than that. URL: http://www.inq7.net/opi/2002/aug/06/opi_csdequiros-1.htm
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