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"FacebookPinterest\n\n Roger Ebert died yesterday, and I couldn\u2019t read enough.\n\n My Twitter feed was flooded not with obituaries, but with transcendent pieces of writing by and about greatest film critic who ever lived. I read his famous review of North, a scathing torch of hatred that was ultimately kind to the director, Rob Reiner. I read about his long and ultimately successful quest to win The New Yorker\u2019s cartoon caption contest. I re-read touching, beautiful profiles about Ebert after cancer took his voice, by Chris Jones of Esquire and the prolific Will Leitch, late of New York Magazine and now with Sports on Earth. I read The Onion\u2019s response, a single paragraph of satire sweeter and sadder than any eulogy.\n\n Mostly, though, I read Roger Ebert\u2019s Journal\u2014the blog he started when his health started declining, and the collection of twilight writing that changed him, in my eyes, from a thoughtful film critic with a TV show to a benchmark of humanity with the talent and skill to communicate the simple and exquisite beauty of life. I wandered the blog like an empty museum. It is filled with wisdom, kindness, and easy prose, speckled with the familiar imagery of Illinois, where I spent my high school and college years.\n\n I re-read &amp;quot;Nil by Mouth,&amp;quot; Ebert\u2019s wistful but never self-pitying essay on the loss of his voice and the ability to eat and drink. It\u2019s meandering but purposeful, like getting lost in the woods but exiting exactly where you wanted to end up. I read &amp;quot;Remembering Gene,&amp;quot; a tribute to Siskel ten years after he died of a brain tumor, written as Ebert himself faced the inevitable. And I read &amp;quot;Go gentle into that good night,&amp;quot; a rumination on death that touches on religion and metaphysics, and is bolstered by art and poetry: two thousand words from the edge of the abyss that have more wisdom than most books I\u2019ve read. He wrote:\n\n &amp;quot;Kindness&amp;quot; covers all of my political beliefs. No need to spell them out. I believe that if, at the end of it all, according to our abilities, we have done something to make others a little happier, and something to make ourselves a little happier, that is about the best we can do. To make others less happy is a crime. To make ourselves unhappy is where all crime starts. We must try to contribute joy to the world. That is true no matter what our problems, our health, our circumstances. We must try. I didn\u2019t always know this, and am happy I lived long enough to find it out.\n\nI look at Ebert, cursed with a condition that made him even better where he was already excellent\u2014a superhero of letters who answered the tragic call, who worked to save us, to give us hope in ourselves and in each other\u2014and can\u2019t help it: I sometimes fantasize about having his condition. Not the cancer that took half his face and ultimately his life, but the inability to speak or eat. I know that it is perverse, wrong-headed. I need my voice to talk to my parents, to call my nieces over FaceTime, to tell my wife I love her.\n\n And yet when I sit at my computer, engrossed in writing and the endless churn of thought and humor shared on Twitter, all without a spoken word, it\u2019s easy to see how the endlessly loquacious Ebert felt so at home on the Internet, a medium that came about so late in his own life. Nothing but the gentle tapping of keys, the purest and most artful sharing of thought. As a writer, it\u2019s hard not to wish for the terrible gift of silence. But no one else could handle it with Ebert\u2019s grace or eloquence.\n\n I learned many things from Ebert\u2019s writing. I know that every day is a gift. I know that being close to death gives you a greater gratitude for life. And I know that I will never be the writer that Roger Ebert was, that I will never be as kind.\n\n But my heart is full, and I\u2019m willing to try."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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