OPINION: The man who had it all

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Jul. 25—My housemate and I like to go to the movies. Netflix is fine, but there is nothing like the silver light coming up in a pitch-dark theater.

And there is nothing like the scale and scope of the big screen.

What's more, this is a time when documentaries are suited to the big screen. They are getting better — less static and less boring.

Summer of Soul is a great new doc about the so-called "Black Woodstock" in Harlem in 1969.

My Octopus Teacher is a most unlikely, very not boring, nonfiction film.

Read more Blade editorials

Last weekend, we saw Roadrunner, a film about Anthony Bourdain, the famed "celebrity chef" turned TV travelogue host, who died at his own hand three years ago.

I don't know that it is a great film. Indeed, its creator has admitted to an ethical lapse that bothers me a lot. (More on this in a few lines.) But Mr. Bourdain himself is compelling.

Troubled, ruthlessly honest and tough minded (including about himself), compassionate, eloquent, relentless, restless, and charming — you cannot take your eyes off the man.

And you cannot stop thinking about him after you leave the theater.

First of all, he wasn't a chef. He was a writer, a writer to his core, who made his living, for the first 25 years of his professional life, as a cook. Not a chef. A cook, he insisted.

He once said that everything he learned about life he learned as a dishwasher and cook.

Like: Show up; show up on time, or early; do your best; and be considerate of your colleagues. What you do not get done, they must do.

He was also not so much a TV star, or travel and food critic, as a filmmaker exploring cultures.

Food and travel were just the way in.

He didn't even start traveling until middle age.

He also said he was not a journalist, though he was. He dug below the surface and disdained all the accepted questions and answers.

And he claimed he wasn't a cause man, just a loner passing through. But that changed too. His empathy kept deepening. He never had to preach. He let the camera roll, and people told their own stories.

So what did he learn from travel, which is not all leisure if you do it right and which is not travel at all if it is only done in a bubble?

Be open. Stay humble. And be grateful, he said. You are lucky to be wherever you land. And you are a guest.

What a tragedy to lose this man and in this way.

There are multiple griefs and curses in suicide. The obvious one is the hurt inflicted on the loved ones left behind. A less obvious one is that suicide tends to have the last word.

But it shouldn't.

This brings me to the controversy regarding Roadrunner.

The director used AI to recreate Mr. Bourdain's voice to read part of an email he sent to a friend. It read, in part: " ... You are successful, and I am successful, and I'm wondering: Are you happy?"

For me, creating the illusion of Mr. Bourdain's voice speaking these words was both wrong and unnecessary. But the rest of the movie outweighs this arrogant stupidity. We get the vital man, alive again.

So the real question on the table is: Why does such a man end his life? Why could he not find happiness?

For Anthony Bourdain truly had it all. Not only obvious success, like popularity, recognition, and wealth, but success on his own terms. And success with love.

He made no Faustian bargains. He did good work. And his work made the world better.

He was beloved, by thousands who did not know him for this.

Those who did know him, loved him, warts and all. Deeply. He had a talent for friendship and left behind many friends and devoted family who still acutely mourn his passing.

How could all that not be enough?

How could he not see all that he had?

Did he break his own cardinal rule? Be grateful.

Aren't many of us breaking that rule every day?

Of course you can explain any suicide as brain chemistry and demons.

But we live in an addiction culture in which a great many of us get a great deal of what we want but are not happy.

So perhaps it is not only an individual matter.

A friend of mine says, echoing something George Orwell once wrote to explain the pull of fascism, that the nature of human beings is that we need to worship something. And we generally pick something that lets us down: another person, the opposite sex, sex itself, money, power, or just more.

In America, if it's good, we want more — or something that tops more.

Rich guys in space would seem to qualify.

Somehow the creation of 50 soup kitchens, or 50 prison libraries, or 50 more St. Jude hospitals, does not have the same kick as your own spaceship and space program.

The Founders assured us of a natural "right" to "pursue happiness."

Were they correct? Is it properly a right?

Or is it more like a compulsion, a need?

And how is happiness to be defined?

If happiness is liberty, Isaiah Berlin said, there are two kinds: the liberty that comes from being left alone, and then positive freedom — making something, creating something.

The American cowboy is allegedly happiest when left alone.

The American entrepreneur, like Tony Bourdain, was happiest when making and creating.

The Founders understood both kinds of liberty — freedom from and freedom to. Public happiness was their kind of happiness, and it derived from the great conversation, the great play of ideas — in civic life, in science and the arts, in the ebb and flow of thought itself.

Thought is private. Its advancement takes place in the public sphere.

Hence, Stephen Hawking, who, demonstrably, did not have a very "happy" life, may have known true happiness.

Hence, Esther Bejarano, who survived the killing of her entire family and imprisonment in Auschwitz by the Nazis and spent the rest of her life fighting antisemitism and racism, may have known a degree of fulfillment most of us will never know.

I have no answers. But I think we Americans got seriously off track at some point. We discovered yoga, for example, and turned it into a further and deeper exploration of the ego, when it is supposed to be precisely the opposite — the shedding of the ego.

We decided somewhere along the way that happiness is a series of moments, strung together — moments to be consumed and the more the better — rather than a way of living, in which happiness is a path. On that path, moments of transcendence and pure joy appear and disappear. But happiness is the path.

And the path has to do with making and giving rather than consuming and taking.

I don't know why so many of the good die young or why good people choose to die young. But I can't help thinking that, in some cases, it is because they didn't see that the thing they pursued so maniacally — happiness — was there all along.

Keith C. Burris is editor and vice president of The Blade and editorial director of Block Newspapers (kburris@theblade.com.)