As children, as adolescents, and even as adults, we are all copycats. We involuntarily and automatically incorporate into our repertoire all sorts of behavior-fragments of other people. I already mentioned my “Hopalong Cassidy smile” in first grade, which I suppose still vaguely informs my “real” smile, and I have dozens of explicit memories of other copycat actions from that age and later. I remember admiring and then copying one friend’s uneven, jagged handwriting, a jaunty classmate’s cool style of blustering, an older boy’s swaggering walk, the way the French ticketseller in the film
I have long watched my two children imitate catchy intonation-patterns and favorite phrases of their American friends, and I can also hear specific Italian friends’ sounds and phrases echo throughout their Italian. There have been times when, on listening to either of them talk, I could practically have rattled off a list of their friends’ names as the words and sounds sailed by.
The small piano pieces I used to compose with such intense emotional fervor — a fervor that felt like it was pure
Much of my fabric is woven out of borrowed bits and pieces of the experiences of thousands of famous individuals whom I never met face to face, and almost surely never will, and who for me are therefore only “virtual people”. Here’s a sample: Niels Bohr, Dr. Seuss, Carole King, Martin Luther King, Billie Holiday, Mickey Mantle, Mary Martin, Maxine Sullivan, Anwar Sadat, Charles Trenet, Robert Kennedy, P. A. M. Dirac, Bill Cosby, Peter Sellers, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Sin-Itiro Tomonaga, Jesse Owens, Groucho Marx, Janet Margolin, Roald Dahl, Françoise Sagan, Sidney Bechet, Shirley MacLaine, Jacques Tati, and Charles Shultz.
The people just mentioned all had major positive impacts on my life and their lives overlapped a fair amount with mine, and thus I might (at least theoretically) have run into any of them in person. But I also contain myriad traces of thousands of individuals whom I never could have met and interacted with, such as W. C. Fields, Galileo Galilei, Harry Houdini, Paul Klee, Clément Marot, John Baskerville, Fats Waller, Anne Frank, Holden Caulfield, Captain Nemo, Claude Monet, Leonhard Euler, Dante Alighieri, Alexander Pushkin, Eugene Onegin, James Clerk Maxwell, Samuel Pickwick, Esq., Charles Babbage, Archimedes, and Charlie Brown.
Some of the people in the latter list, of course, are fictional while others hover between the fictional and the real, but that is of no more import than the fact that in my mind, they are all merely