chilling story

I can’t say I’d ever heard of John McWhinnie before, but you can read his obituary HERE.

“John McWhinnie, a rare-book dealer and gallerist known as a champion of words and images on paper in an age of electronic reading, died on Friday in a snorkeling accident in the British Virgin Islands. He was 43.”

First of all, it’s always a bit scary to read of anyone dying at exactly your own age (I’m 43 myself).

Second, getting carried away by an ocean current while snorkelling is one of those random disasters that could happen to pretty much any of us. (If not snorkelling, then the equivalent in some other area of transportation or life more generally. I do happen to like snorkelling, though.)

And third and finally, it sounds like this was a really cool guy doing something he was passionate about and which not too many people do well.

My condolences to the family.

Though I hate reading things like this, we all know that they put things in perspective too. I just lost a perfectly healthy college classmate due to a sudden and massive heart attack in September, and life hasn’t looked quite the same since (he was not a close friend, but was someone I did like a great deal). It’s now always in the back of my mind that I’m technically old enough to die of a heart attack on any given day. There’s a big difference between knowing that abstractly and really grasping it from a nearby example.

[ADDENDUM: And McWhinnie did Philosophy at Boston College, a very continental program. We surely had mutual friends, and quite possibly I met him once at SPEP or something and simply forgot about it.]