On accomplished men and women
Accomplished men and women can be exhausting—their inspiration is constant and their energy never seems to flag. You don’t so much as have a conversation with them as serve as their sounding board—you can see their eyes straying even while they’re finishing one thought and latching on to another. And when you do find your voice, finally, in a momentary lull in the monologue that passes for their conversation, you know they’ve drifted to some other thought, or some mental note of what they have to do, and you don’t figure at all. You might as well be the waiter at the restaurant, the bus boy cleaning up, the woman sitting by the window, the man standing on the street corner outside the window and reading a map—you’re nothing but the landscape they’re seeing but not really registering because their mind is turning on something else. Their internal world is a maelstrom.
It must be so breathtaking to be so accomplished and to have that endless resource of energy to carry out all the tasks your mind and heart conceive. It’s something like staying young forever and forever having those youthful enthusiasms. Did you ever see a kid not enthusiastic about something, and sometimes several somethings in the course of one day, or even one hour?
Kids at playschool pick up the nearest block and envision building a house or fire engine with it. They climb on their bike and they’re suddenly salivating at the thought of the ice cream cone they’re going to pick up, or the M&Ms at the candy store colored for Halloween.
Did you ever listen to your teenage daughter on the phone? Or your son talking about his favorite team? Or how going to Dunkin’ Donuts for a vanilla latte is an event?
In this issue we have several people who haven’t lost that vital élan of life and inspiration. Dr. Nikos Linardakis is a man with several enthusiasms that he keeps percolating all at the same time. He is a serious man of medicine, a serious entrepreneur, and a serious creative artist all at the same time. And when you talk to him, you get caught up in his enthusiasms and the notes he always makes on scraps of paper of people he has to call and thinks he has to look into. I can’t imagine him being bored with anything he does because he has enthusiasm of a very precocious child.
The same with the artists featured in this issue, Babis Vekris, who “lights” up his world, literally, in any number of dazzling ways, and never lets the darkness seep in; and George Kordis, whose Byzantine works illuminate the spirit from within.
They are all an example of how inspiration and enthusiasm can be sustained and how it can sustain a world that can forever seem as promising and dazzling every day as the world we once knew as children.
Dimitri C. Michalakis
