In Memoriam: Alfred Fairbank

Charles Lehman

Quick impressions, visions, and knowledge are often more blurred uncertainty than clear recognition, more darkness than light. And the significance of events or personalities encountered in the course of learning can remain hidden for years until they appear in mind, settled and crystalized in time outside our schedules. To those of us outside Alfred Fairbank's immediate family and circle of friends, to those of us who are his disciples - having trusted ourselves to his teaching and guidance many years ago - Alfred Fairbank is still slow to be understood and appreciated. Because of his greatness as a teacher and scribe, we will need great amounts of time to reflect on who it is that we have learned from. When it finally comes, and it will take a long time, there will be nothing dramatic about the understanding - it will be found by many in ordinary living. We will find the person we seek as we proceed with the craft he taught us. Erudite essays and research about Fairbank the Scholar and Fairbank the

Scribe will not come close to the gracious, gentle person who will appear clearly to our mind's eye when we share in some part through our own flesh and blood the handwriting he taught; when we identify with his goals and values not merely in a biography to be added up in words, but in the life to be felt dancing in the movements of a pen following his hand in everyday handwriting, seeking, as he did, to raise dead letters to life; that will be the beginning of our appreciation of Alfred Fairbank.