Herbert Spencer was once a well-respected philosopher who in fact coined the expression "survival of the fittest" after reading On the Origin of Species (you won't find that phrase in Darwin's manuscript!). He was even once nominated for the Nobel Prize for literature. Sadly for his legacy, but rightly so, he is now entirely discredited and disgraced due primarily to his later delusional writings around, and promotion of, his theory of Social Darwinism: that some races are superior to others, and therefore rightly have more power in human society.
Napoleon was once (and, apparently, in some circles still is) hailed as a military tactical genius as he rose to become the Emperor of France and grew the French Empire as it spread across much of the European mainland and beyond. Later, however, he led perplexing and arguably self-sabotaging military campaigns including the disastrous invasion of Russia, all leading eventually to his infamous defeat at Waterloo.
In more modern times, A. Duritz, in the early times of the heydays of the 1990s, gave us moving introspective song lyrics including the gems "And the feeling that it's all a lot of oysters, but no pearls" and "In between the moon and you, the angels get a better view of the crumbling difference between wrong and right". These, presumably following some disastrous downfall in Mr. Duritz's life, leading to a deeply felt and clearly horribly prevalent mental decline, rapidly devolved over the years, culminating in the disastrous and frankly embarrassing:
American girls, oh American girls
American girls, oh oh oh oh
American girls, oh American girls
American girls, oh oh oh oh
Mr. Duritz's cringe-inducing public crumbling of his character and any respect he might once have held has been further evidenced by his rambling, incoherent, and dare I say shameful soliloquies expounded from somewhere deep within his poisoned soul, that he punishes those who are still foolish enough to attend his shows with between songs as he laments his lack of a female partner after all these years of being a rock and roll star.
Nevertheless! Forget not the great debate of art vs. artist. Despite his later failings, did Napoleon's original campaigns not exhibit greatness? We can continue to appreciate these tactical decisions and indeed their genius, while separating them from the broken man that Napoleon eventually became. One might even go so far as to say that we can still enjoy a Woody Allen movie solely based on the intrinsic contents of the movie itself, and divorce it from the fact that just maybe the creator of that piece of art later turned out to be a pedophilic deranged sexual predator who married his former partner's adopted child.
Given all of the above, I think it's fair to say that we can still find and then use the strength that still exists in lyrics of old from A. Duritz, including when he sang:
Don’t waste your life
Yeah I don’t wanna waste my life
You don’t wanna waste your life
I don’t wanna waste my life
I have been to Paris and I have
Been to Rome
And I have gone to London
And I am, all alone
And I think it's even more fair to say that it's a very sensible thing to do to engineer a very complex change in your life so that you can live out a 14-second (probably misconstrued) idea from a song from the 1990's even though the singer of said song has since been disgraced.
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It was a hot day in August. The Pemulis Family was enjoying a long vacation in their ancestral Canadian homeland when Pemulis was offered a new job. This was it! His chance to live out the ending of the song A Murder of One. All he had to do was accept the job, give notice at his current job, leave a week in between the jobs free, plan a trip to Rome for that intervening week, have his mother-in-law fly across the ocean to take care of the children, and then step one would be complete. His new job would provide him the funds to, several weeks later, travel to Paris by train and thereby complete step two. His plan was almost too genius because if all went perfectly according to plan, the new company would hold a Christmas party in London but a few days after his return from Paris upon which they would fly him to said party and the plan would be nearly complete. It's almost too easy. Now, being all alone is not something that Pemulis wanted for the long term, but he had taken on this project and needed to find a way to complete the plan even if it was just temporarily. One day business and military planners will write books about this because it was just all too brilliant. He would be sure that this entire chain of events would take place right as a new Covid wave was rising. The infection would have to take place following all the travel to not put any of steps 1, 2, or 3 at risk. But upon return, infected but alive, the need to self-isolate would take care of everything including its temporary nature. And thus, all alone. I bow before you and say now: Mission Accomplished.
