Bond Across the Pond

NY Times ^ | March 31, 2004 | WILLIAM SAFIRE

[neverdem]

WASHINGTON — "In rhetoric, however," I lazily wrote, "parrhesia has a specialized meaning."

In zinged a mock-irate letter from Alistair Cooke, founder of what he called Sanpickle, "Safire Nit Pickers' League."

Did I write this unnecessary ize, he demanded, on personalized notepaper, to be read by customized shirts? "Your little flourish of bloviation provoked spasms of sarcasm, like, `I suppose if he got in trouble in England he'd go looking for a Specialized Constable, i.e., a constable appointed for specialized occasions.' "

Then there was the time I wrote "our mutual fascination," an error that drew Cooke's "You mean `our common' or `our shared' fascination. `Our mutual fascination' means our fascination with each other: `Our mutual fascination with' anything is nonsense, you dummy! And I thought you were the American language wallah!" He signed it "Your mutual pedant." I sent him a copy of the Dickens novel "Our Mutual Friend."

The wry, literate and wise BBC radio commentator and television host with whom I shared a linguistic fascination and delightful correspondence died this week at 95. He spent the first third of his life as a British subject and the last two-thirds as an American citizen, but in 58 years of "Letter from America," on a weekly basis, always seemed to be the British interpreter of life in the daughter country.

(Oh, how Cooke despised word-padding like in nature, a period of, process, area, or on a basis. He proposed the song title "Stars Fell on the Alabama Area.")

His obituaries — many prepared decades ago — and appreciations from fellow commentators as a modern-day Tocqueville (better lose -day) cite his wartime reporting and his speech to Congress on the U.S. Bicentennial, as well as his mastery of the conversational style on the air.

He wrote as one would speak, complete with sentence fragments and self-interruptions. But he also spoke as if he were writing: instead of "Come over for a drink," Alistair would cite his friend E. B. White's line that the most beautiful sound was "the tinkling of ice at twilight."

As the years went by, and he was afflicted by "my friend, Arthur Itis," the question arose: what kept him going so productively? Not only was he living longer than most, but living with his mind more actively engaged than most.

"I try to stay on top of the news," he told me as he entered his ninth decade. Neuroscientists tell me that a disciplined contact with the world around us keeps the brain's synapses snapping. Deadlines keep our minds alive.

When retirement means lollygagging on a beach or vegetating in a rocker, the once-active brain atrophies and the mind wanders. But when forced to keep focusing, in many cases the exercised brain keeps in shape.

I know another supergeezer in the opinion dodge: Daniel Schorr, who will be 88 in August, writes and delivers three commentaries a week on NPR, plus an interview on Saturday morning, which puts Dan within striking distance of Alistair's iron-man record. He is why I have a button on my radio preset to NPR.

Cooke's radio tradition, now carried on by Schorr, suggests that people who lead active lives should do their best to keep at it, switching only when necessary to new careers or educational challenges with other disciplines or pub dates. In tomorrow's long-lived generation, retirement will be replaced by redirection.

Cooke's life also reminds us that the English-speaking alliance around the world, with its tradition of free speech and inclusiveness for immigrants, offers a standard for other nations.

In the past century, a statesman and a journalist exemplified Trans-Atlantic Man. The political figure was Winston Churchill, who coined the term "special relationship" to describe the unique bond across the pond. The journalist was Alistair Cooke, son of Britons who became an American, who would have made certain nobody changed that clear English to "specialized relationship."

Correction: The Martian division of Sanpickle notes that a NASA rover landed in the Gusev crater on Mars, and not, as I wrote, in the Sleepy Hollow crater or depression. (The whereabouts of Judge Crater remain unknown.)

[mrsmith]

With the loan of Alistaire Cooke and P.G. Wodehouse- England made it's amends to the colonies.