Word: lennons
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...asked simple questions to which there would never be simple or satisfactory answers. If, as was being said, the man liked his father so much, why did he shoot him? His mother explained: "He was probably a confused person." Not good enough. Better to know, Sean Lennon said, if he was confused or really meant to kill. His mother said that was up to the courts to decide, and Sean wanted to know which courts she was talking about: tennis or basketball? Then Sean cried, and he also said, "Now Daddy is part of God. I guess when...
...enough, that his father did not have to die to become part of everything. Given the special burden and grace of his great gift, he already was. Not just for his wife or son but for more people than anyone could ever begin to number, the killing of John Lennon was a death in the family...
...official records, the death would be called murder. For everyone who cherished the sustaining myth of the Beatles-which is to say, for much of an entire generation that is passing, as Lennon was, at age 40, into middle age, and coming suddenly up against its own mortality-the murder was something else. It was an assassination, a ritual slaying of something that could hardly be named. Hope, perhaps; or idealism. Or time. Not only lost, but suddenly dislocated, fractured...
...outpouring of grief, wonder and shared devastation that followed Lennon's death had the same breadth and intensity as the reaction to the killing of a world figure: some bold and popular politician, like John or Robert Kennedy, or a spiritual leader, like Martin Luther King Jr. But Lennon was a creature of poetic political metaphor, and his spiritual consciousness was directed inward, as a way of nurturing and widening his creative force. That was what made the impact, and the difference-the shock of his imagination, the penetrating and pervasive traces of his genius...
...Lennon's death was not like Elvis Presley's. Presley seemed at the end, trapped, defeated and hopeless. Lennon could have gone that way too, could have destroyed himself. But he did something harder. He lived. And, for all the fame and finance, that seemed to be what he took the most pride...