As I work my way through my Instapaper backlog, I will be posting some items that I have wanted to share.
Errol Morris produces some of my favorite content on the New York Times website. Much of what he produces is thought-provoking; more than that, however, the content he produces often allows me to take a wider view of the subject. (This feeling is not unique to me – I believe he had a blog on the New York Times website called “Zoom,” which I always thought was named that because of his ability to take the specific and make it universal.) He now blogs here for the Times. One of the features from a few months ago was an article about “The Umbrella Man” and his friend Josiah “Tink” Thompson.
“The Umbrella Man” is about a man, holding an umbrella, that appears in the background of the video footage from the John F. Kennedy assassination. No one else in any of the footage is holding an umbrella – it was a sunny day, there was no need to use an umbrella. And yet, here this guy is holding an umbrella.
And this guy holding the umbrella is standing exactly at the point where JFK was assassinated.
Think about that. The only person holding an umbrella in all of the crowds that day happened to be standing right where bullets were fired.
I want you to see the short film yourself, so I will not say more about the specifics.
Early in the video, Mr. Thompson says:
“If you put any event under a microscope, you will find a whole dimension of completely weird, incredible things going on. It’s as if there’s the macro-level of historical research, where things sort of obey natural laws and usual things and unusual things don’t happen. And then there’s this other level where everything is really weird.” Tink Thompson
I just love this quote. It applies to so many areas of our lives. He says it in the context of this quote, but he also relates it to quantum physics.
The macro-level of our lives can even seem usual, plain, boring.
But it’s at the micro-level, when you are zoomed in very close, that people start to get strange.
And I love strange people because I try not to hide what is strange about me. It’s one of the reasons I can be so intense when I meet someone new; I am utterly fascinated by new people of all kinds. I cannot resist sometimes trying to figure out, “What makes you so strange?”
