W

THE DOMAIN OF THE BODY

inston Churchill had a productive life.
He first saw combat at age twenty-one, and wrote his first
bestselling book about it not long after. By twenty-six, he’d been
elected to public office and would serve in government for the next
six and half decades. He’d write some ten million words and over
forty books, paint more than five hundred paintings, and give some
twenty-three hundred speeches in the course of his time on this
planet. In between all that, he managed to hold the positions of
minister of defense, first lord of the admiralty, chancellor of the
exchequer, and of course, prime minister of Britain, where he helped
save the world from the Nazi menace. Then, to top it off, he spent his
twilight years fighting the totalitarian communist menace.
“It is a pushing age,” Churchill wrote his mother as a young man,
“and we must shove with the rest.” It may well be that Winston
Churchill was the greatest pusher in all of history. His life spanned
the final cavalry charge of the British Empire, which he witnessed as
a young war correspondent in 1898, and ended well into the nuclear
age, indeed the space age, both of which he helped usher in. His first
trip to America was on a steamship (to be introduced on stage by
Mark Twain, no less), and his final one on a Boeing 707 that flew at
500 miles per hour. In between he saw two world wars, the invention
of the car, radio, and rock and roll, and countless trials and
triumphs.
Is there stillness to be found here? Could someone that active, so
Herculean in their labors, who embraced so much strife and stress,
ever be described as still, or at peace?
Strangely, yes.