John’s study, in London
John Whiting’s wife, Mary, let me know today that John, who was 93 and not in the best of health, recently passed away.
Many of you will recognize the name from my many, many “Thanks to John Whiting for the link” references in my monthly Links of the Month blog posts. He and I exchanged over 500 emails over the years, and through that exchange I got to know John quite well. Our earliest communications were about a summary I had posted twenty years ago of Ronald Wright’s book A Short History of Progress, a book that John said transformed his worldview.
John was the exemplary “Joyful Pessimist”, always ready to respond to anything I said with a witty, informed, and entertaining anecdote, often about some famous person he’d rubbed shoulders with in his many pursuits in academia, the media, the culinary arts, writing, and the “music biz”. But he was a voracious reader, and over time his perspective on the future of our current civilization, fed by the assessments of how previous civilizations collapsed, and by the endless scroll of bad news in the media, grew steadily darker.
John’s humble reflections about having had a privileged and bountiful life, and, in that context, his equanimity about facing the end of that life, and the precarious and difficult future that the younger generations will face, have served as a model for me in my later years, as we pass the torch, unsteadily, to those who will likely live lives both more awful and more awesome than the stable, comfortable ones that were afforded us.
One of John’s ‘signature’ expressions was ’Thank You, One and All’. So this is a reply ‘thank you’ for John, and Mary, and those he leaves behind, richer for having known him. For all you did, and all you told us about, and laughed with us about, and warned us about, John — thank you.
