To Patagonia and Beyond: In Memoriam Armand Singer (2011)

(Eulogy given by Hart Wegner, at Brooks Hall 211 on campus of West Virginia University, 6 October 2007.) I have known Armand Singer for thirty years. Ours was at first a bond of professional respect, but time was good to us and allowed us to grow closer to each other like two intertwining trees into which benevolent gods had turned Philemon and Baucis. We embraced when we met wherever that was, in Morgantown, in Arab fortress of Mdina on Malta, in a hotel lobby in Las Vegas, or in a country house in Wales. It is with regret that I recall times when I did not accept his invitation to come and speak somewhere in world. For years afterwards he let me feel how disappointed he still was that I had not stood by his side in Bergen, Norway, in Graz, Austria, in Pamplona, Spain. Although he chose to spend his life in a small college town, Armand Singer was truly a citizen of world. Roaming with a hungry heart, his restless spirit drove him to possess world and make it his own, so much so that he had become part of all he had met, as Tennyson said. Or not, because Emerson thought, the soul is no traveler. Maybe in spite of all his travels Armand's heart and soul had always been in Morgantown with his university. We last saw each other in a parking lot on Paradise Road under giant guitar of Hard Rock Hotel in Las Vegas. He had fallen in his hotel room and was in great pain, fearing that he had broken a rib. In farewell, I embraced him and pressed his head to my chest and told him that I loved him. I didn't think there would be another time that we would meet in this world, but he told me that he was organizing another colloquium in October, but first he would go to Patagonia. What folly, I thought, how can this frail body wracked with pain endure such a journey? Thoreau, whom we both admired, wrote in Walden, that if you are chosen to be town clerk, you cannot go to Tierra del Fuego. As far as I know, Armand never wanted to be anything like a town clerk, but to travel to outer reaches of known world, that he always wanted to do, and he still did when at his age he had no business doing it any longer. After our last meeting, in few months before he died, he wrote, he edited, and he finished what he had begun, giving us others a model of a life completed. Over years he and I had talked about dying but never about growing old. There were other times when I felt that it was near end for us like on evening when I spoke last in ballroom at colloquium dinner. When I finished, Armand and I sat down on one of round tables with audience. On big screen above our heads was last image of my talk about paradise, Church of Il Redentore in Venice, gleaming white across blue water. We stayed and chatted although a woman stood by door ready to lock up. And then Armand talked and we listened, as we had done so often, and no one left. Under image of Palladio's classic facade of church built to give thanks that Black Death had been defeated and life had triumphed onc e more, mood was serene with an intimation that this may be end of it all. As always with Armand, more was to come. Once after we had talked about our lives, I sent him Tennyson's poem Ulysses, with lines highlighted that applied to him, including these, How dull is it to pause, to make an end, To rust unburnished, not to shine in use! Little remains; but every hour is saved From that eternal silence. He used his life well. Having been retired, as law then demanded, at too early an age, he never slowed down and kept his faith to his university, to his profession, and to his creations that affected so many, Colloquium on Literature and Film and Philological Papers. I admit, that I was one of those who urged him to do colloquium one more year, just once more, and it didn't take much to convince him. …