POSTCARD FROM LONDON: My Sweet George

LONDON—Two Saturdays ago, I crossed Abbey Road. The camera caught me mid-stride, as it did the Fab Four more than 30 years ago in the famous photograph that would grace the cover of the last album the Beatles ever recorded.

We’ve all seen the picture. John leads the way, dressed all in white. Ringo follows in a black mod suit. Paul is next, barefoot, cigarette in hand. George brings up the rear, clad head to toe in blue denim. With a green marker I carefully tagged the stone pillar next to the Westminster NW8 street sign and the wall in front of Abbey Road Studios across the street, adding my name and the date to all the other testimonials of adoration—some quoting favorite lyrics, some merely proclaiming, “I was here,” some wishing John still was.

As I finished studying the signatures and walked past an emptying synagogue (Ringo’s shul, I joked) on the road back to the Tube station, I began to sense that what the great Rav Abraham Isaac Kook said of the Western Wall was also true of the world’s best-loved crosswalk: There are men with hearts of stone, and there are stones with hearts of men.

And yet I felt just as acutely the transience and triviality of the whole exercise. The wall in front of the Abbey Road Studios next door, regularly repainted to accommodate a planet’s worth of pilgrims seeking a cheap thrill, bore only signatures dating back a few days. My name would be gone in the blink of an eye.

The next day—Sunday—Reuters reported that George Harrison was dying of a brain tumor. The tabloids had said it many times before, and George had denied it, but this was Reuters. Thinking only of how Freddie Mercury finally admitted he had AIDS the day before he died, I was convinced that the quiet Beatle had one foot in the grave. He had dodged throat cancer and a lunatic’s knife, but at 58, he had finally lost his battle with cancer.

Monday: a worried man with a worried mind rides a double-decker bus through the English countryside. And then word comes from the Associated Press: George and his wife deny the rumors once again. Though ostensibly as haggard and thin as ever, George is reputedly healthy and active. Tuesday: my plane touches down at Logan Airport. Wednesday: back to work. The roller coaster comes to a stop—or does it?

George has been at times a difficult man to root for. Had it not been for Yoko, the Beatles’ breakup might well have been pinned on George's increasing assertiveness as a songwriter and increasing inability to get along with Paul. George was the colorless Beatle, the dubious target of allegations of plagiarism, the man whose wife so cruelly inspired his lovestruck best friend Eric Clapton to write “Layla.” (And when the couple divorced and Clapton married Patti Harrison, who could not help but feel that the better man had finally won?)

George was not the best Beatle, God knows (nor the worst—sorry, Ringo). His oeuvre pales next to that of John and Paul, but George’s tunes are somehow unspeakably beautiful—simple, evocative, wise, true. (Let us overlook “I Got My Mind Set on You” for a moment.)

When John and Paul were heavy-handedly questioning radicalism in “Revolution,” George was quietly reflective: “I look at the world, and I notice it’s turning, while my guitar gently weeps.” While Lennon read a book on Marx and loudly professed his doubts about capitalism and private property in “Imagine,” George had already written a better, more incisive, more believable song about what ails us: “All through the years, I me mine, I me mine, I me mine. Even those tears, I me mine, I me mine, I me mine.”

And then there is his gentle, hopeful reminder: “All things must pass.” The unimaginable thought of George and his toothy grin shuffling off this mortal coil seems a rich irony in light of these soothing words, as we realize that there are statutes of limitations on everything—whether we can tell what they are ahead of time or not. And so we get a few minutes to nurse a warm pint of stout, a couple of days to view graffiti before it’s painted over, six days to take a vacation. Four years for a college education, eight for a rock band, three score and ten for a life.

I am awed, humbled and frightened at how fragile the whole damn thing is. But at the same time, I rest a bit easier knowing that George is still angling for the dozen more years we assume he’s due. But what if he dies tomorrow, or next month, or next year?

George remembers Abbey Road as a place of discord, where he and Paul screamed at one another and the Beatles fell apart. But does he know how millions of others will see it for decades after he and his old cohorts—Paul and Ringo, Patti and Eric Clapton, Dylan and Petty—are gone? Perhaps George saw bitterness and regret. Does he know what I saw there?

How do stones acquire the hearts of men? At the risk of misinterpreting the famously incomprehensible Rav Kook, it seems to me that there is only one way: if men leave in stones their own hearts. Unlike the gorgeous mosques next door, the Western Wall is nothing to look at—it’s only holy because millions have wept there. And Abbey Road is just another tree-lined avenue in St. John’s Wood—cherished because thousands have had their picture taken in the crosswalk, because millions have looked into someone else’s eyes and seen George’s “Something,” and because the world entire has been converted to the gospel of the album’s penultimate song: In the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make.

David C. Newman ’03, a Crimson editor, is a government concentrator in Quincy House. He would like to apologize to David M. DeBartolo ’03, a Crimson executive and devoted Rolling Stones fan, for having dragged him out into Zone 2 for this cheesy photo op. Cheers.