by  Dr. Jeffrey Lant

Author’s program note. Tyler Clementi was a young violinist who with his obliging instrument produced sounds that touched the heart. Given world enough and time who knows where this undeniable talent, showcased in the Ridgewood Symphony Orchestra and Bergen Youth Orchestra, would have taken him?  But because he was attracted to men rather than to women, he was never to know. And so today, I sit here in Cambridge starring at a photograph of a dead boy we cannot afford to forget, for to forget would be the real crime…

… but memory is sharp, hard, remorseless, exquisitely painful…

And so we must have Mozart. Mozart who so well understood life… and who with such grandeur enables us to cope with death…

Thus, as the occasional music to this tale I give you the Master’s Requiem Mass in D Minor (K. 626), composed in Vienna (1791) available in any search engine…  Focusing on his life, whilst never forgetting his death and uneasy spirit…

The thousands of pages dedicated to the matter of Tyler Clementi focus on when he died, how he died, why he died, and, above all, who is responsible that he died… and I shall also deal with these crucial questions. But, first and foremost, we must never lose sight of the boy at the center of this matter… for this is above all his story…

Tyler was born in 1991 in Buffalo, New York and raised in  Ridgewood, New Jersey. He was a good student and like so many other aspiring musicians found life, beauty, meaning and sustenance in the celestial purity of sound, often so intense as to produce exaltation, apotheosis, catharsis, ecstasy. Tyler was one of the gifted who took mere notes on a page and produced beauty… and whenever he picked up his violin that beauty was his to command…. and to give…

… and he gave freely, liberally, with the exuberance and trust of youth and a heart that sought love and meant no harm to anyone…

And so Tyler Clementi went to Rutgers, to test himself against the best of his peers… He was just 18 years old… with a mere handful of days to live.  What happened next is now a matter of detailed record… why it happened will always require the judgement of Solomon and perhaps more… for the person we long to ask — Tyler himself — cannot tell us.

Dramatis personnae.

Now come the principal actors…

Tyler, his roommate Dharun Ravi, fellow hallmate Molly Wei… and the gaping worldwide community found on the Internet and without which there would have been no story, no tragedy, and a happier life for all.

Here is what happened….

On the nights of September 19 and 22, 2010 Clementi texted Ravi about using their room for the evening, a thing college students have been asking their roommates forever. On the first occasion Ravi met Clementi’s friend, an older man whom Ravi did not like. Nothing so far meant very much; surely no one thought that Tyler would be soon dead. But the mad chemistry of  tragedy had started… and it fermented in the brain of Dharun Ravi.

Ravi now says, as well he might, that he wasn’t  the agent provocateur for what happened, but as he stands convicted before the world, this is not surprising.

Fact: He thought it fitting and proper to use a webcam to view  a portion of Clementi’s dorm-room liaison with another man… and immediately tweeted it to his list of 150 people, thus beginning its viral dissemination.

Fact: Ravi posted text messages saying “Yeah, keep the gays away” and “People are having a viewing party with a bottle of Bacardi and beer in this kid’s room for my roommate”, along with directions on how to view it remotely.

Fact: Ravi set up his webcam and pointed it toward’s Clementi’s bed, where it was found by police, still so pointed.

All this Tyler learned…  and acted responsibly, complaining to his resident assistant and two other college officials. He also wrote in detail about these events on the “Just Us Boys” message board and  the Yahoo message board. He asked for a new room, a new roommate, and for help. He was doing what he had to do and he was doing it responsibly.

But here is where things went so very wrong…

“Thus conscience does make cowards of us all.” (Hamlet)

But something gnawed at Clementi and so 38 times following his first webcam viewing he returned… returned… and returned again and again to that bit of video that he became convinced had destroyed his life, his future, his peace of mind. He was wrong, so very wrong, but he was young, inexperienced, and, he thought alone. And that is the real tragedy…

Thus did his dark purpose commence.

8:42 PM September 22.

The cast of characters was growing now. College administrators were now involved.. Ravi was back peddling as quick as he could, minimizing what he did, why he did it, stating over and over again that he meant nothing by it, didn’t mean it, apologized for it.

But already Tyler had his foot upon a very different  path… He was Hamlet now, without even knowing it:

“To be, or not to be: that is the question. Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or take arms against a sea of troubles.”

He had solved this conundrum…. tragically, finally, unnecessarily… an act of passion from a mind in turmoil.  “The George Washington Bridge over the  Hudson is the most beautiful bridge in the world.” Le Corbusier

And it was here Tyler Clementi came to die, that is to say to do the extremest thing in his power… to embrace oblivion. What made him do this deed of rashness, to end everything and remove the future and every joy to come? We can never know, for his final words, sent on his cell phone from the great marvel towering above him, picked out in the brightest of lights, was brief, inadequate, far too little for such an epochal event:

“Jumping off the gw bridge sorry.”

And so he jumped, alive for seconds still… already gone from the living, en route to eternity, the last things he saw, the dark waters of the Hudson, the explosion of light that was Manhattan. Then nothing… a dead boy of enigmas and secrets which I so long to know but never shall.

Envoi.

On March 16, 2012 now 20 year old Dharun Ravi was convicted of invasion of privacy and bias intimidation, a hate crime. Wherever he goes in life, however long he lives, every day he will think on young Tyler Clementi, whose vivid memory and restive spirit will be ever present… “To die, to sleep/No more… Be all my sins remember’d.”

* * * * *About the Author

Harvard-educated Dr. Jeffrey Lant is CEO of Worldprofit, Inc., providing a wide range of online services for small and-home based businesses. Services include home business training, affiliate marketing training, earn-at-home programs, traffic tools, advertising, webcasting, hosting, design, WordPress Blogs and more. Find out why Worldprofit is considered the # 1 online Home Business Training program by getting a free Associate Membership today at http://www.worldprofit.com

by  Dr. Jeffrey Lant

Author’s program note. I am, have been, and always will be a book man; a man, that is, whose life has been enriched in every way by books. These books have been my joy, my obsession, always the source of bliss. And no wonder.  For in my own special corner with book in hand and my imagination, I have learned something of the utmost significance. Books can take you anywhere. With them you can be anyone… achieve anything…  experience everything. … This is what a book can do and what books for the last 65 years have done for me.

Books… the necessary and irreplaceable tools for education… boon companions and dearest friends for life, the solace of our older age, and where we look to assuage our grief when a loved one passes. Books offer us everything… for books are about everything… about everyone… about everywhere.

The only drawback to books… is that there are so many, so brilliant, so moving, so epochal, so packed with fact and incident that we time-challenged humans don’t have even a tiny fraction of the hours we need to know them, read them, think on them, and use them to improve the person we are and wish always to ameliorate. Books are always present, reminding us with their full assistance, how much better we can be… if only we open the cover and allow the words and pages that follow to take us to the superior place that is theirs to give to each of us.

Had we but world enough and time (Andrew Marvell, 1681)…

… but you see, that is the eternal challenge, for we do not… and this, then, becomes the particular puzzle of all our lives. How to know of, find, and find the time to read what must be read… the greatest books by our greatest masters; for as one grows older and older still, one discovers that time is too short to read anything else. That is why when people do me the honor to ask what books have influenced me, I am ever ready with the contents of my library to advise them. And so I take this opportunity to tell you about “The Leopard”, a masterpiece that was in 1957 so despised by Italian publishers that some said it would never be printed, was not worth printing… thereby breaking the heart of its author, Prince Di Lampedusa whose manners were so refined that he did not excoriate and rebuke the purblind publishers who thereby missed a work of high genius. It is this great book by an undoubted master that I tell you about this day.

But before I tell this tale, I wish to commend to you the incidental music to accompany this piece. It is the “valzerone e quadriglia” by that composer of cinematic magic, Nino Rota (1911-1979). Go now to any search engine and play it at once, for if “The Leopard” could possibly be improved upon, it would be by Rota and his mesmeric dance rhythms.  A novel about the Italy you know nothing about.

You cannot understand this book unless you know that its author was a bona fide principe, prince of ancient lineage and generations of hubris, condescension and perfect manners. He would not have liked you… why should he?… but you’d never know how exquisite his insults until long after he’d made his graceful exit from your unwanted company, the mark of a true aristocrat, a nonpareil who kills but never maims — unless he intends to.

But, and this too is crucial to understanding this book, this principe was not a prince of Italy, but a prince from Palermo, in Sicily, an island which had been since ships could sail the highly desirable target of one monarch after another, Dei gratia all.

As a result, there was a plenitude of titles on Sicily; grandiose, exalted, the residue of one temporary regime after another. Every noble knew how every title in the kingdom had been procured, by blood, valor… bedroom services or outright purchase. Thus the same title could mean wildly different things, of one order going up, while another was descending. Every nobleman and most especially his milady knew every nuance and secret. And so reputations wilted and died, scandals commenced and scandals reported behind delicate fans which at once enabled them to show their artistry and delicate wrists to best advantage while obscuring expressions which might well reveal too much.

This was a world the prince of Lampedusa knew well, every flutter of a fan, every patent of nobility finagled, every tittle of gossip, enjoyed, examined, twisted to best advantage. This is the arcane world, now as distant as the moon, that his excellency brought to life in “The Leopard”.

“Nothing much happens. They just talk.”

In doing my research for this article, I came across the line above, sentiments posted online by a reader puzzled by this book. This is understandable, for unlike our action packed books and films, “The Leopard” moves at a very different pace… the pace of real life in the 1860s when the old verities of Sicilian life were giving way before the insistent realities of Italian unification.

You see, the unified Italy you know and which you may assume has existed for centuries is in fact a new reality. Since the fall of the Roman Empire, Italy had been broken up into smaller states. And these states spent their time intriguing against each other, gaining an acre here, losing a city there. It gave generations of princes and their privy counselors something to do during the delicious days of la dolce far niente. It was this ancient system that the princes reigning in Turin, the House of Savoy, were determined  to end… reigning instead over one nation, their patrimony.

It is towards the end of this opera-bouffe revolution that Lampedusa begins his tale, a tale based on the life of his paternal great-grandfather, a grandee of Sicily who saw everything changing, changing, changing to the detriment of the beautiful life he loved but could no longer afford.

And so “The Leopard”, Prince Fabrizio Salina, finds himself doing something he abhors but knows is absolutely necessary… allowing his beloved nephew, Prince Tancredi Falcorieri, to marry beneath himself… to the most attractive young lady of the district, Angelica Sedara, who is socially ambitious, endlessly calculating… and rich.

Thus while they live, think, intrigue, eat, dance and make love, the House of Savoy changes everything for everyone… Thus is the reader rebuked who thinks that nothing is happening, for in fact an entire world and everyone, everything in it changes forever right before your eyes…

… a riveting story told in language so beautiful, so poignant, so epigrammatic and apt one is forced to reread line after line so as not to miss a single limpid word. It is for this that “The Leopard” is a work of genius and the prince of Lampedusa occupies at last his just place in the literary pantheon.

April, 1993.

I read “The Leopard” in the spring of 1993; I know because I entered the date on the title page. I’ve been reading it again lately, and will come back again, perhaps only to read a page, or even a single paragraph, before my life is over. Classics are like that… drawing us back, insinuating themselves into our lives in ways lesser creations cannot hope to duplicate.

Now, therefore, go to any search engine, find Nino Rota’s valzerone written for Visconti’s 1963 grand film recreation of the leopard’s doomed world, open the book, turn the music on and commence reading from the first line,

“Nunc et in hora mortis nostrae. Amen. The daily recital of the Rosary was over…” but your pleasure has just begun.

About the Author

Harvard-educated Dr. Jeffrey Lant is CEO of Worldprofit, Inc., providing a wide range of online services for small and-home based businesses. Services include home business training, affiliate marketing training, earn-at-home programs, traffic tools, advertising, webcasting, hosting, design, WordPress Blogs and more. Find out why Worldprofit is considered the # 1 online Home Business Training program by getting a free Associate Membership today at http://www.worldprofit.com

by  Dr. Jeffrey Lant

I’ve been a published writer and author for six decades now. I’ve got 18 books and thousands of articles under my belt. As a  result people are constantly asking me the “secrets” of writing that resonates, captures readers and gets your message delivered. Alright, you’ve asked me quite enough… I’m ready to spill the beans…

Power writing Solution #1: Recite what you write.

When was the last time you needed to write something with real impact? Something that made your point, hammered it home, and did so in the most clear lucid way?

The correct answer is that the “last time” you did it was probably today, what with all the letters, advertisements, posters, reports, etc. you’ve got to write in your business.

Is this how you approached the task?

1) Bad attitude. You hate writing, or at least your’re doing  a mighty good imitation of someone who does. Thus, you grumpily sit down at your computer, hold your nose, and resolve to race through this unwelcome task in record time.

2) The writing you produce under this “system” is just about as bad as bad writing can be. As a result it’s wordy, misspelled, redundant, diffuse… and that’;s just for openers.

3) Yuck! When you see what you’ve got, you gulp. It’s terrible, but fortunately not so terrible that other terrible writers and readers will ever notice. Declining standards shroud any number of problems…

Then take a good look in the mirror. Remember when you were young, idealistic in college, and that smarty-pants professor said you were either part of the problem… or part of the solution. Now you finally know what he meant: you can either keep producing the writing that has brought you so little fame and fortune… or you can apply Solution #1 to the problem.

To excite, recite.

When was the last time you wrote something, then read it aloud to yourself to see how it sounded and maybe to tweak it?

Answer? Well, let’s just put it this way, shall we? When was the last time you read anything you’d written aloud? Wasn’t it that time in Third Grade where you been forced by Mrs. Noroski, the personification of evil, to read a poem she coerced you to write in the first place? Thus, reciting takes its place just before having a root canal. And nothing’s going to change your mind, so there.

Methinks the lady (and the gent, too) doth protest too much.

Now hear this: you begged me for my secrets to power writing… and here’s one of the two most important. You’re just going to have move on, relegating that fiasco that constituted your one and only poetry reading to the recycle bin where it will surely find the oblivion which it so dearly merits.

The absolute necessity to read your prose… if you care that it gets read.

It’s time for brutal honesty. You write to be read, to influence, to motivate readers to take action. Reading aloud, reciting, helps you achieve this objective… and you’ll do it (stinker though it may be) because recitation means results… and improving results is what it takes to excel and prosper in our strenuous culture.

First, BIG relief item. There’s an audience of just one to these academy award winning performances: you! And unless you’re the culprit, no one need ever know that you do this whenever you want the best possible content and the best possible content presentation.

Here’s what needs to be in your kit for this project: a printer, marking pens, and a surface on which to spread this masterpiece in process. Now add gumption and you’re ready to go…

You’re looking for errors. Here are some places you’ll find them:

1) Line length. Good writers, that is to say  persuasive writers know that less is more. Thus, the longer the sentence, the more likely the reader misses the point, and this will never do.  If you find yourself taking another breath to get through the sentence in question, that sentence is too long. The optimum line length is 10-15 words, and you must cut sharply as a result… and so keep your readers.

2) Do the same severe pruning with your paragraphs. Short paragraphs are the best paragraphs; they should run from 6 to 8 lines.

3) Start as many sentences as possible with “you” (explicit or implicit). Whatever you write is written for just one person — the “you” who is your present reader. That person must have your complete and total focus, because if that “you” stops reading, it doesn’t matter what your message is, this all-important  person isn’t going to do anything about it.

4) Use action verbs. Here’s the drill you want every reader to follow: your prose calls for action… your prose gets the reader to act. But this only happens when you take a machete to your passive verbs. They are torpid… impenetrable… movement killers. Just the way they should be and remain forever — that is if you want your prose cited in the “Guinness Book of Records” under the category “execrable”.

5) Make war on all purple passages. These you can easily spot when reading for, when uttering them you automatically start talking like the divine Sarah Bernhardt (1844-1923), which means in the sententious idiom of late 19th century France!

Your language should be clean, simple, efficient — you know, the way it isn’t now.

Solution # 2. Rewrite.

Wow, after scrutinizing your latest effusion per Solution #1, you’re surrounded by items that have been ruthlessly removed. What now? Simple; my next sure-fire writing insight, viz. that the most effective writers are the most conscientious rewriters. In other words, the ones who do not merely spew words on the page, but who do what’s necessary for maximum impact. This means you.

And so today, at first light, take your latest writing project and go out into the pristine dew of day to recite it. Sure your neighbors will deduce that you have finally gone mad… but the many new prospects and customers you’ll derive will leave them happy… leave you a paragon of prose… and richer.; oh, yes, a very great deal richer.

About the Author

Harvard-educated Dr. Jeffrey Lant is CEO of Worldprofit, Inc., providing a wide range of online services for small and-home based businesses. Services include home business training, affiliate marketing training, earn-at-home programs, traffic tools, advertising, webcasting, hosting, design, WordPress Blogs and more. Find out why Worldprofit is considered the # 1 online Home Business Training program by getting a free Associate Membership today at http://www.worldprofit.com