Word: nicking
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...remember one of Nick's favorite books from last year: E.M. Forster's Howard's End; it happened to be my favorite book at one point, and I can't remember now which of us influenced the other--although such an occurrence is not infrequent among friends. Now, Nick and I both knew that Forster was a "bourgeois" novelist, but still, Nick told me of crying at the plea that Forster puts in the mouth of the wise Meg--"only connect," she says--only connect your own sufferings, your longings as a person, to other people's. That was what...
...often experienced books simultaneously. In addition to Forster, there was Ignazio Silone's Bread and Wine, the story of an Italian Communist resistance fighter who returns to fascist Italy disguised as a priest. Nick's father was a well-known Pittsburgh doctor; mine a Chicago criminal lawyer. The personal poignance of Pietro Spina, the rich young man who gives his life to the poor, and foregoes comfort because of his faith--not in God, but in his people--was so close to our hopes (I hope not illusions) about ourselves...
...Mussolini's attack on Africa, Spina paints on walls slogans like "Long Live the African People," "Down With Imperialism," and "Long Live the International." Silone makes clear that the townspeople wanted to murder the person who wrote those blasphemous things. America in 1975 is not yet fascist Italy, but Nick understood what it was like to uphold human decency while everyone else seemed to worship power, money and terror...
...Nick Minard '76 died on Tuesday. He left his friends with unreturned books and memories of kindness, generosity and humanity. For those of us who knew him, the warmth of others takes on new meaning--an importance, a fullness, a real value and at the same time, a knowledge of the precariousness of friendship that makes it all the more valuable...
...Nick Minard left all of us something greater still, the values that his life embodied: those of socialism and decency, and a refusal to see injustice and respond to it idly standing by, or ignoring it, or insisting that it didn't exist. These values cannot die even in great despair and hopelessness. They are unconquerable. They are so much a part of each human being's deepest yearnings that they will endure...