Postscript
Of all the rare
individuals with whom it was my accidental good fortune to become really
intimate, Louis alone had the gift of what I might call transparent
understatement. Hype, to use the language of our critical young, hyperbole, was
foreign to his cautious, scientific nature. He would generalise only when he
knew he would not be misunderstood. Just as his life’s work lay in measurement,
so he took the measure of us, of human beings, his friends. “Humanity is a big word”, he said once.
“I prefer to deal with humans”. Thus was I taken down several pegs in my own
esteem, and that was in our youth. In my extreme old age I have not forgotten
it, for it is becoming more and more relevant.
I can see Louis
now, listening, with his customary ironic chuckle, shifting slightly on his
bottom in embarrassment, at my mentioning the obiter dicta of a certain contemporary
- who must here be nameless - who thought that meteorology was the study of
meteors.
Louis, in my
submission, was personally the ironic pessimist. Hope is not a scientific
concept. He held, tentatively as always, that the future of the planet lay in
the hands and minds of those who may mean well and do worse, those who talk of
innocence when the reality is ignorance and those who are (again the famous
understatement) not even well-meaning.
The most we can do
- and I hope I am not allowing subjectivism to creep in - is to delay a process
that appears to be more and more inevitable, ‘the end of the world’, that
religionists are always on about. In his ‘Journal of the Plague Year’, Daniel
Defoe observed Solomon Eagle, who ran naked in the City of London with a
brazier of blazing coals on his head, calling the victims to repent “because
the End of the World is nigh”.
My dear friends,
we are not Solomon Eagles. Let us do what we can to delay the inevitable, for
in the midst of Death, we are in Life.
Address of Donald Miller (86) at the
Commemorative Celebration of his friends, Louis Essen, Joan his wife and for
his generations.
Leatherhead, Surrey 5 September 1997
