by Dan Eldon (1970-1993)

Saturday night was a full moon and I was in a bar in Santa Monica. On my left side sat an old man nursing a tall glass of Southern Comfort.

If I seemed too young for this bar, then this fellow was definitely too old and noticing my curious stare, the barman leaned over conspiratorially and whispered, “You see him?” I nodded. 

“That’s Ralph Waldo Emerson.”

I was taken aback. Sitting next to me was one of the greatest American thinkers in history, and I at least wanted to get an autograph on a cocktail napkin. I turned half way around to listen to his conversation.

“You know what I hate?” he slurred. The barman grunted and raised his eyebrows while he wiped down the counter. “I hate how in this distribution of functions, the scholar is the delegated intellect. In the right state, he is Man thinking. In the degenerate state, when the victim of society, he tends to become a mere thinker, or, still worse, the parrot of other men’s thinking.”

The barman’s eyes narrowed and he slowly took off his hat “Ralph, I think you’ve had enough, it’s time to go.” Emerson turned to me and demanded, “What the hell are you looking at anyway, junior?”

I answered, “I was wondering if you would sign my cocktail napkin for, umm, a friend of mine?”

He sighed. “This makes me sick. Instead of your generation going out and doing your own thinking, there you are still reading shit that I wrote over one hundred and fifty god dammed years ago and repeating it without even lifting a finger or a brain cell to update it or add to it.”

“Let’s get out of here, there’s a place I have to show you.” He tossed a handful of grubby notes onto the counter and slid on his jacket. It was a vintage leather Harley Davidson jacket with “The Original American Scholar” written across the back in white letters. He staggered out the door and I followed.

* * *

I recognized where we were going and in no time, we pulled up in the U.C.L.A. carpark and were walking towards the library.

He strode into the main hall and hopped onto a table with the agility of a man half his age (and since he is almost 188 years old, it did actually take him a while).

Many students were looking in horror at the old man on the counter and more and more gathered as the news spread. There was a din of angry students telling him to get down so they could study. He pulled an old pearl-handled Colt 38 out from his jeans and fired it up into the ceiling twice. The crowd became hushed as bits of wood and plaster fluttered down from where the bullets struck the ceiling.

“Listen up, bookworms, books are the best things well used; abused, among the worst. They are for nothing but to inspire. The one thing of value is the active soul -- the soul, free sovereign, active. This every man is entitled to; this every man contains within him, although in almost all man, obstructed, and as yet, unborn.”

The shots must have attracted the campus police and out of the corner of my eye, I saw a squad of SWAT men, clad in black, fanning out along the upper level. He continued, “I’m not saying don’t read books, but for Gods sake read them to inspire you, not to be ruled by them. As the Arabian proverb says, “A fig tree becometh fruitful.”

The next second, there was a flash from behind the Balkan History shelf as a sniper sent a round straight into the back of Emerson’s neck, shattering his spine.

I screamed and ran towards the body and lay behind him, holding his bloody head in my hands. I looked up at the police with tears in my eyes: “My God, you don’t know who you’ve just shot.”

Emerson’s trembling fingers reached inside his jacket and pulled out a pen. I had produced the cocktail napkin from my pocket to try to stop some of the bleeding.

Emerson took it and with his last ounce of dying energy wrote, “The active soul.” And signed it.

Adapted from an essay Dan wrote for a class at UCLA during the fall of 1991. Visit DanEldon.org to see full version.

Dan Eldon was an artist and photojournalist who freelanced for Reuters news agency and was one of the first to bear witness to the famine in Somalia. He was killed on assignment in 1993 at the age of 22. Thirteen years after his death, Dan is better known today than he ever was, due to the publications of his artistic journals and the critically acclaimed documentary, Dying to Tell the Story. His life story and the unique way in which he went about documenting it through art have become his enduring legacy. It speaks to an idealism, a Romantic seeking that cuts across generations but inspires young people especially.

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