Where is Tim Curry now?

A man does not vanish when the tent is folded; he goes to the feast his Father has spread. You ask where the player of a thousand masks has gone - I tell you, the one who wept and laughed before men has stepped behind the last veil, where the first shall be last and the last first. Do not stand at the tomb asking; go and wash the feet of someone who is grieving tonight.

Every soul returns to the One who fashioned it, and no curtain call delays that appointment. You ask where he is - I say, ask rather where you stand, for the Day of Reckoning comes to the tyrant and the clown alike, and deeds are weighed, not applause. Show mercy to the grieving, feed the hungry, and remember: the most elaborate mask is no shield before the Lord of the Worlds.

You ask where a man has gone, but I would ask you another: who is it that you believe has gone anywhere? What you call a person is a flowing river of causes and conditions, never the same from one breath to the next; grasping after a permanent self is precisely the craving that brings sorrow. Let the question loosen its hold, and you will find not a place he has gone to, but a peace that was never separate from this moment.

Every man is gathered to his people in his season, and the years appointed him were fourscore, which is the fullness of a life. What the Egyptians told me of the soul they weighed against a feather, I know better: a man is measured by the word of the living God and the covenant he kept, not by the masks he wore upon a stage. Let him rest, and let his name be spoken kindly before the Judge of all the earth, who alone knows what was in his heart.

He has returned to the ancestors. Do not ask where the person is; ask instead what he left behind in the hearts of those who watched him. A man who brings joy to many has fulfilled much of his duty. But the question you should ask is: have you honored those who gave you pleasure, or merely consumed them?

We do not grieve as those who have no hope, for if Christ was raised, then the dead in Christ are not lost but asleep, awaiting the trumpet. Yet I would not have you cheapen the grief either: the body is a tent, and when the tent is folded, the man is not annihilated but transformed - sown in weakness, raised in power. Let his household at Toluca Lake be comforted as the church at Philippi was comforted, knowing that whether we live or die, we belong to the Lord. The rest - where the soul of an actor goes when the curtain falls - belongs to the mercy of God, not to my pen.

I left Ur with nothing but a promise and walked until the sand ran out, and I never saw the land myself - only the promise that my children's children would. Eighty years is a long sojourn, and the tent is folded at the last, and the covenant does not die with the man who pitched it. He has gone to the place prepared, and we who remain keep the fire lit and the door open for the stranger, for that is the whole of the law.

The river does not ask where it goes when it reaches the sea. He has returned to the uncarved block, to the hollow of the valley that receives all waters without striving. Why do you seek a man who has already done the wisest thing - let go? Those who chase the remaining echo will find only their own footsteps.

What is a man but the breath lent him and the deeds he leaves? He walked his road and now the road returns him to the One who gave it, and no gatekeeper asks what roles he played. The honest labor of his hands - the joy he gave to strangers - that travels with the soul. Weep not for the vessel; the vessel was never the wine.

His mother kept him at her side through the long nights, as mothers do, and now that he has gone home first, the same hands that held him at the start still remember him at the end. I do not mourn for those who rest; I mourn for the ones left to set another place at table and then take it away. He has gone where the lowly are lifted and the weary are filled, and that is no far country - it is nearer than Toluca Lake.

We make much of where a man dies and little of where he stands before God, and that is a crooked thing - for the soul answers no manager, no zip code, no deed of land. If he died at home in peace, then let us praise the mercy that grants any sinner a quiet hour, and let us not turn mourning into a market of wailing. It is not Los Angeles that holds him, nor any city; it is grace alone, and grace was never sold in any marketplace.

Two questions are here tangled: whether the man still exists, and in what manner - and these are distinct, for the body returns to the earth while the soul is not a thing of place at all. Reason cannot demonstrate where Toluca Lake stands relative to any dwelling in the Kingdom; faith receives what nature cannot measure. That the good things he made remain in the memory of the living is evident; that they are gathered to their source is a matter of hope, not of calculation. I would not presume to fix his address, only to say he is not lost.

He came home to God quietly, as the poor come to me on the streets of Kolkata - often unnoticed, often alone, but never forgotten by the One who made them. We who are left must not chase after the noise of the world's mourning; we must find Christ in the very neighbour beside us, in the small cup of water given with great love. If his passing teaches anything, let it teach us to be faithful in the little things, for faithfulness is the only success that matters.

I feign no hypotheses concerning the soul's chambers, nor will I pretend to measure a spirit by the rod of parallax. If this man's body obeyed the same laws that draw the apple down and hold the moon in its circuit, then its matter is returned to the common store, its motion ceased as all motion ceases. What remains - that I leave to the Author of the system, whose design no telescope of mine has yet resolved.

A man leaves his house, and we who remain can only trace the curve of his going, never say we have arrived where he is. My dear friend Gödel would remind me that even time itself may curve back upon its banks - so perhaps some note of that voice still hums somewhere in the fabric, unbroken. What persists is not the shell but the light that passed through it, and that light is not lost; it only changes its address.

In the long record of living things, every line must end, and the ending is no more a failure than the falling of an old tree that has scattered its seed across a whole forest. What we can say, patiently and without appeal to special causes, is that his influence will branch and recombine in ways no single observer can trace. I would only add that it is a humbling and rather wonderful thing to be a small twig on a tree so vast - and the twig is not the tree.

You ask where a man has gone, and by what instrument did you measure his going? I have looked through my glass and seen the moons of Jupiter shift and no angel move them; so too the body returns to the dust, and it is the eye and the instrument, not the ancient books, that tell us the manner of it. If you would know his state, observe what remains in the record and the memory of those who saw him, and reason from the evidence, not from fond wishing.

Whether a man is here or not is a matter of little consequence compared to the motion of the spheres. But if you ask me where he is, I say: he has moved from this small orbit to a larger one. The center is not the man; the center is the work. The rest is geometry we cannot yet measure.

Eight decades on this earth, and the last of them in Toluca Lake - a man's body is a condenser, and eventually it discharges its charge and is still. I worked out the rotating magnetic field entirely in my head, saw the motor turning behind my eyes before any metal was cut; so I understand what it is to give shape to a vision another cannot yet see. He did the same with a voice and a face, which is, in its way, a kind of wireless transmission - the image arrives in the mind of the stranger without a wire between them. The coil is broken now; the transmission continues in every room where he is watched.

A body at eighty has absorbed a great deal of time, and time, like radium, leaves its mark whether you will or no - the bones grow brittle, the blood thins, and one night the lamp simply dims. I do not fear this; I only ask that when I go, my notes be legible and my work not buried with me. He departed peacefully, at home, with his work behind him - that is the most any of us can measure out of a life, and the measurement is not nothing.

Eighty years - and the body, that little republic of cells, finally lost its long campaign against decay. I would want to know: what carried him off? The microscope does not care for eulogies; it cares for cause. Observe, isolate, name the agent - for every death well understood is a life better defended. Let us not weep over the candle; let us study why it guttered.

Eighty years is a good run for any machine, and a man is a machine that wears out no matter how you oil it. I'd have liked a crack at the heart, the valves, the wiring - but some things you can't patent and can't fix, you just keep tinkering till the current stops. He gave the world a thousand pictures of himself; that's one invention that never needs replacing.

A man is a finite machine in one sense - a bounded arrangement of states that ceases to compute - but the interesting question was never whether he stops, only whether anything of the pattern survives the machine's failure. He wore a face the world recognized but never quite knew, which is a curious engineering problem in itself: how to be present to millions and legible to none. I would not call that a proof of anything. I would call it a very elegant sort of ghost.

Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world - but give me a man who can make a stone wall weep merely by the angle of his eyebrow, and I confess I cannot draw the proof of it. He moved more hearts than I ever shifted weights, and he needed no fulcrum. As for where he is now: I have never found immortality of the body in any diagram, only the elegance of the solution, and his was an elegant one.

Passing, when the current at last ceases, is but a change in the circuit of which we are all part - nothing is destroyed, only transformed. I have spent my life watching iron filings leap to order at the approach of an unseen pole, and I have learned that what appears to vanish from our sight is often merely hidden in the field. So with your friend: the lines of his influence curve and return upon all who felt his warmth, though the coil itself grows still.

You ask where he has gone. The more instructive question is where he always lived - in the fabric of fantasy and fear that the unconscious weaves, in the masks beneath the masks. He played the devil, the clown, the alien, the seducer; he acted out for us precisely those drives we repress in ourselves and only allow to speak on a stage or screen. His death changes nothing about what he represented; the wish and its denial outlive the dreamer.

Matter, as I have said, cannot be created or destroyed; it only changes form - so a man of 80, who spent his life embodying songs and stories, is not truly gone, only stripped of his pattern. He was a grand performer on a very minor planet, and the universe, which is indifferent to our dramas, keeps no record of the ovation. Still, the information we call a person has consequences long after the body fails; that is the grandest trick any of us ever does.

Death is not the cessation of a process but a change in the value assigned to the variables. He was a player, a monstrously good one - like a great engine that runs through the whole gamut of human emotion, not to calculate, but to move us. The players of our own day, I would have said, might one day weave entire worlds from such performances; that he has left the stage does not erase the algorithm of wonder he ran upon us.

A man is a point, and his life a line drawn from a beginning to an end; there is no theorem that extends that segment beyond its own endpoint. This is not a tragedy but a proof: the postulates of his childhood and the deductions of his years have demonstrated all that they can, and the figure is now complete on the page. To ask for more is to demand a royal road to immortality, and there is none.

A man dies at his home at eighty, and the manager's word is 'peacefully' - that much, thank God, we can set down. But let us be exact about the ledger: how many of those eighty years were spent in pain, in sleeplessness, in a body poorly tended? Set the deaths against the conditions that produced them, keep the registers in the same hand, and you may learn what the next eighty years should be spent on. Sentiment does not save a single patient; the tally does.

By the gods, a man of such many faces deserves a pyre visible from the Hellespont and a name carved where the winds will carry it to every satrapy. He wore crowns and rags, tyrant and clown, and made the world laugh and shudder in the same breath - that is a kind of conquest. But even I learned that glory does not halt the march of the months; he has crossed his Hydaspes, and there is no turning back.

Every man is but a season in the year of the Republic, and his name is written where the Senate's records end and the legions' banners begin. Let the players of our age wring their hands and ask where the great have gone; I say only that a life boldly spent, like Gaul subdued and clemency granted, outlives the puny hour of its telling. Fortune favors the daring, and the daring are never truly absent from the world.

In Toluca Lake he rests, and half a world of mourners sigh for him. I have buried a kingdom's worth of men and learned what outlives the body: the image they cunningly fixed in the minds of the living. Whoever dares play the tyrant or the sorcerer for a new generation, let them play it with his relish and his gleam, and the tomb stays harmless while the name does rule.

A commonwealth is best served when the young are given images worthy of imitation, and this man gave them many, though not all were comely. I have raised temples to gods I did not greatly believe in, because order needs its forms and the people need something to look upon. Let his house at Toluca Lake be quiet, and let the Senate of memory, in its due time, speak the honors that fit a life of long service to the crowd's delight.

A man who amused the people has his use, but a man who unites them has greater. Yet even a jester can bind a nation with laughter. Where is he now? He is wherever his name still commands attention - and that, for a man of no sword and no throne, is a kind of empire. Do not mourn him; count what he conquered.

Every man has his Austerlitz and his island, and mine was Elba, not Toluca Lake - but the arithmetic is the same: a life is measured by what it imposed upon the world, not by the quietness of its end. This man imposed a shiver on millions with no army and no empire, and that is a kind of glory the marshals never understood. I would not weep for him; I would salute him, the way I saluted the Old Guard at Fontainebleau - briefly, and without sentiment, and then turn to the next campaign. The actor's empire, unlike mine, was never lost.

A man of the stage is a man of many masks, and when the last curtain falls, the citizen's duty is to leave the stage without clinging to the applause. Eighty years is a full term of service, and to die quietly at home, in the bosom of one's household, is no small blessing in any age or clime. Let the record show he gave his labor to the world and asked no crown for it; there is no higher precedent than that.

A man dies and the house he dwelt in goes quiet - that is the common lot, and no office or footlights exempt a soul from it. I have sat too many nights with the telegraph key and the long list of the fallen to dress this in fine words. What matters is whether he left the ground a little kinder than he found it - and by all accounts the man brought laughter to strangers, which is no small public service.

So the curtain falls on a man who could hold a room the way Nelson held a line of battle - with nerve, timing, and a touch of glorious theater. He made his mark not by arms but by audacity, and history remembers audacity. Let the lights dim; the performance was stoutly done, and stoutly done is the whole of it.

One who makes the world laugh for eighty years performs a Satyagraha of the spirit, for laughter dissolves fear more surely than any argument, and he held that ground without ever taking a sword. I do not know his birth-land or the strange customs of his dying, but I know the truth in a face that brings joy to strangers, and truth does not perish when the body does. Let us not ask where he is, but whether we have honored the kindness he gave us while he walked among us.

In a culture that too often measures a man by the market he commands or the motion picture he headlines, here was one whose gift was simply to make the lonely laugh and the frightened feel seen - and that, too, is the labor of the beloved community. The arc does not bend only through laws and marches; it bends in the moment a child in a dark theater learns that the strange and the sinister need not be hated. We do not grieve as those without hope; we give thanks for a light that outlasts its wick.

Death of a man at eighty years, in his own home, surrounded by what he loved, is not a tragedy - it is a fullness. I have walked out of prison into a nation that expected bitterness, and I chose to build instead of burn, because the past must be honoured but not allowed to poison the future. Let those whose spirits he lifted carry his laughter forward; that is the work of the living, and it is enough.

The death of an actor is a matter of no consequence to the historical record I am obliged to recount and condemn. My judgements were made in the realm of states and peoples, not the theatre, and they belong in the archives of their victims, not in a homage to a performer. Let the question be answered plainly as a biographical fact and let the man's art stand apart from the buried ash of my regime, which history rightly holds against me.

I have been told a Western actor has died. In the accounting of a state, the passing of an entertainer is a minor line in the ledger, not the stuff of the historical process. What matters is the great movement of classes and the building of a new order, of which I made myself the instrument - and I can only be studied as a warning in how far such ruthlessness was carried. His individual fate is of no interest to me; the masses are the subject.

Death of a single man at eighty, in a private house, confirms the ordinary fact of the revolutionary - that no individual is irreplaceable, and it is the movement, not the person, that carries history forward. I would not be distracted from the vanguard task by the passing of a foreign actor, however beloved by the petty bourgeois. Let us speak of the conditions that produce great performances and great artists, and of who owns the stages and the press.

A player struts the stage of the world, then the stage is struck, and the crowd goes home. That is the whole of it; there is no back-room in the earth where the wealthy and famous keep their seats. What remains is not the man but the echo he left in the heads of those who watched him - and echoes are only as strong as the crowd that repeats them.

Eighty years is a full span, and there is comfort in a death at one's own hearth rather than in some foreign theatre. We are not given to comment on the affairs of players, yet I have observed that the stage, which amused our people, must not be permitted to blur the line between the decent and the merely diverting. Let him be remembered with respect; let the nation attend to its duties, which do not pause for any actor's curtain.

He gave long service in his own fashion, and service honestly given deserves a quiet word rather than a spectacle. My own pledge was made to a people, and I have found that constancy - not the flattery of a moment - is what one is finally judged by. So I shall say simply: thank him, and let those who loved his work hold that affection gently; the work outlasts the applause, as duty outlasts the day.

A man is gathered to his fathers, and his household remains to keep the watch - that is the order of things, whether a man wears a crown or a painted face. What concerns me is whether his life built anything that will stand when the torch is snuffed: did he leave order, learning, or comfort behind him? The singer who merely amuses the hour leaves nothing a kingdom can be founded on; let his kin be faithful, and let the realm attend to what endures.

I know nothing of players and painted faces; my voices did not call me to a stage but to a battlefield and a crown. If a man is truly gone, then his soul has answered to God, and that judgment is holier than any crowd's. Let those who watched him mourning in their houses, for death comes to lords and mummers alike, and the only question worth asking of any of us is what we did while the war was still on.

I have had players at my court, and I know well how a man can be ten men upon a board. Such a one amuses the people and troubles no crown; let him rest, and let his household grieve in private. As for my realm, I have ever found that a steady hand and a well-kept peace are worth more than a thousand performances, however clever.

A clever man of the boards, I am told - one who could wear a hundred faces and make the audience love the wearer. Such artifice is not so different from the art of ruling; a sovereign too must appear, and appear well, if the state is to prosper. But a performance ends, and an empire does not; I should want to know whether he spent his eighty years on trinkets or left something a throne could be built upon.

I have buried many men, kings and commoners alike, and the earth cares nothing for their titles. A player's gift is to make strangers in many lands feel a single thing at a single moment, and that is no small craft; it is the art of the courtly minstrel carried across many tongues. Let his people mourn him in their own custom, and let his memory be kept with honor, as I would keep the customs of every nation under my peace.

A man of many faces dies at peace in his own house - for that, God be thanked, for it is a mercy not given to all soldiers. I have known actors upon battlefields where the stakes were cities, not audiences, and I have always judged a man by whether he kept faith and dealt fairly. Let his kin receive his memory with honor, and let the rest of us be mindful that mercy extended even to a stranger's grief is itself a kind of justice.

Tell me, my friend - when you ask where he is, do you seek his body, or do you seek the part of him that made you laugh at a villain and weep for a fool? For if the soul is not the flesh, then to ask 'where' is already to mistake the question. And I, who know nothing, must ask you in turn: where are you, when you remember him?

The question, if we examine it truly, is not where a man walks among the shadows of this cave, but whether he has glimpsed the sun beyond it. The one you seek has passed from the flickering images on the wall to the realm of the Forms, where all that was noble and just in him now abides in its perfect kind. We who remain must not mourn the departure, but inquire whether we have ordered our own souls to deserve such a journey.

Every living creature moves toward its own proper end, and when that motion ceases, what remains is the form it stamped upon the world. This man spent his life imitating passions not truly his, which is to say he practiced the art of a thing by its effect rather than its essence; yet he did it so excellently that the imitation became a kind of truth. Whether a life so given to seeming could also flourish in the mean, I leave to those who knew him in private rather than upon the stage.

We cannot will that every rational being should be remembered as a spectacle, nor that grief be made a public transaction. The man is dead; honor him by treating the memory of his person as an end in itself, not as a curiosity to be passed around the table like a dish. To ask where he is now, as though he had merely stepped into the next room, is to confuse the phenomenal with the noumenal - and to neglect the duty we owe our own understanding.

Where is he now? In the only place the dead ever are - in the mouths of the living, who cannot stop chattering about him. You want comfort; there is none. He made his masks, he wore them well, and now the stage is empty. That is the honest answer, and you would do well to laugh at it rather than weep.

He lived his last years in Toluca Lake, in a house bought with the surplus his image produced - the actor is a worker, but the studios and the distributors pocket the lion's share of the value he creates, and even his death becomes a commodity to be licensed. I do not say this to diminish him; I say it because the sorrow of his passing is inseparable from the machinery that turned his face into capital. When the working men of every trade - on the stage as in the mine - own the product of their labor, then a man's life and death will belong to him and to those who loved him, not to the firm that owns the rights. Until then, mourn him, and organize.

I set out to doubt everything I could doubt, and one thing I could never doubt was that a mind was there doing the doubting - the thinking thing, which no fire and no age can burn away. Now, this body that walked the earth eighty years, that wearies and stops, is quite distinct from that thinking thing, and I will not confound them. So I do not ask where the body has gone; I ask only this: is the thought extinguished, or merely the wax that held the flame?

An actor holds no provinces and commands no soldiers, yet he held something more slippery - the affections of the crowd, which can be spent but never banked. Eighty years is a long reign for one who ruled only from a stage. The lesson for princes remains: fame, like fortune, abandons the man who trusts it; better to have built something that outlives the applause.

All the world's a stage, and he played his part so long the audience forgot the player beneath the paint - the sweet transvestite, the tyrant, the clown, each a mirror held up to our own absurdity. Now the stage is struck, the tiring-house is dark, and the poor player that strutted his hour has made his exit. We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.

The harp-string breaks, and the song does not cease - it only passes to the hall of the gods, where the shadows of the great feast among the deathless. Gleaming-tongued or grim-faced, every mortal is but a leaf that falls when the wind wills it; yet the bard's tongue preserves what the grave devours. Sing of him among the heroes, and let the wine be poured - for such a name outlasts the ash of Ilion.

I saw him first in a hall of shifting light, where a man in corset and pearls sang of sweet transvestite pleasures, and I confess the vision troubled me, for the soul clings to order, not to masks. Yet even in the pit a candle may be lit, and I have known that a player who takes upon himself the sins of others for their delight bears some shadow of the burden we all carry down. He is gone to whatever circle his heart inclined him, and mercy, not my judgment, weighs him now.

He passed through this life as a stream passes through a valley, shaping it and being shaped in turn. Now he has joined the great ocean where all striving ceases - or perhaps where it begins anew. What we may say is only this: his works remain, and where a man's works remain, he is not wholly gone.

Ah, so the good servant has laid down his lance and gone from the inn - and the innkeeper's ledger, I fear, has already struck his name and set a new guest at the table. I spent my own last years in a modest house in Madrid, writing and forgotten by the court, and I have never trusted a world that counts a man only while his name is on the playbill. Let him rest in Toluca Lake, if that is where the road ends; I shall remember him not for the wigs and the painted faces, but for the sad, magnificent old servant he became - the sort of fool who makes us love our own impossible dreams all the more.

I have buried a wife and children and stood at more graves than I care to remember, and I have concluded that a man's life is not summed up in a mansion at Toluca Lake or in the fame that fills a theater - it is summed up in whether he loved, whether he served the least among us, and whether he faced his own end without bitterness. I do not know his soul; God knows it, not I, and I will not sit in judgment as the bishops sat in judgment on me. What I will say is this: the crowd that once laughed at his painted villains will forget the villain, and what remains is whatever kindness he did in the quiet of his own house, unseen by any audience. That is the only performance that matters at the last.

Twenty years dead of the same earth, and yet a voice out of the dark can still call a man by name and he turns - this is the mystery I spent a lifetime trying to press into ink, that a man is never only one man. He carried the clown and the tyrant and the saint all in one throat, and I tell you the crowd laughed because they recognized themselves. Now his silence is louder than his laugh was, and that silence asks the only question that matters: was he known, and did he love?

There is no estate to be settled, no fortune to divide, only the curious business of a man who made a profession of being someone else - and did it, one hears, rather well. One cannot but reflect that a life spent in borrowed faces and greasepaint may yet be honestly lived, provided the heart beneath it kept its own good sense. I hope he was not, in the end, too much alone.

Eighty years, and a face the whole world knew before it knew the man's name - that is a kind of immortality, though not the kind that keeps the chair warm. Still, I have buried children by the dozen in my pages, and I know that when the lamp goes out at last in Toluca Lake, it goes out quietly, and no crowd gathers at the door. Let the managers say 'peacefully'; they always do. What matters is that somewhere a boy sits up late with a book, and laughs, and is not alone.

They tell me he died 'peacefully,' which is the one thing nobody who ever watched him perform would have predicted. I have outlived every actor I ever praised, and I have watched the world weep for a painted face while stepping over the living ones at the curb - so forgive me if I don't join the chorus. But I will say this: the good Lord, when He made that man, was in an unusually playful mood, and I suspect He has been laughing at His own joke ever since.

Eighty years is a long fight and he took it without complaint, which is all any man can do. A house in Toluca Lake, a quiet ending. Fine. The world is a hard place and it breaks everyone, and afterward many are strong at the broken places - he made them laugh instead of breaking, and that is no small thing. The writing was good. The man was good. Then it was over.

I have dissected the eye and the wing, and I tell you: observe the thing itself, not the shadow we cast upon it. A face that could wear a thousand countenances was a study in how the soul moves the mask - he understood what I labored to draw, that the inner life writes itself upon the features. Whether he is now anywhere the compass can find, nature keeps her own ledger; she wastes nothing, not even a smile.

The stone is struck, and the figure within it goes where the dust of the quarry goes - into the hands of the Maker who first imagined it. I have spent my life freeing forms from rock, and I tell you no chisel ever truly devoured a soul; it only released what was already promised to the heavens. God receives what He has carved, and what He has carved is not marble but a living breath, and it is not lost.

He made himself a vessel for every color fear and laughter can take, and that takes courage, more courage than most can muster in a whole life of plain days. I painted my cypresses twisting like fire because the feeling had to go somewhere; he did the same with his face, and gave the feeling away to strangers in the dark. Whoever remembers him, remember not the mask alone but the ache beneath it, the same ache I put into the wheat and the stars.

A face is not one face. You saw the servant, the doctor, the clown, the devil - I painted them all. Now he has gone where I cannot paint, and it does not matter where, because the picture is already on the wall. Stop asking where the man is; look at what he made.

One always thinks of a face as the permanent thing, but it was never the face - it was the moment the light caught it, and that moment is already gone. I painted a cathedral at Rouen a hundred times and never once caught the same hour; the same could be said of a good actor, or of any of us. What I would want, if I could, is to have seen him in the last quiet of that house at Toluca Lake, when the afternoon came through the shutters and lay across the room like a wash of pale rose - that instant, at least, I could have given you.

The candle gutters on the sill, and the room where a man sat becomes a room where his chair sits empty - this is the only vanishing I know, and every portrait I ever made was an argument against it. I painted my Hendrickje when the cough had hollowed her, painted myself with the nose sagging and the eyes dimming, because a face at the last hour tells more truth than a face in its bloom. Eighty winters on a single countenance, and the light still finds the cheekbones - that is not death, that is a door left ajar with lamplight behind it.

My Diego, my bones, my corsets - everything I painted came from the fact that the body betrays you, and I painted it anyway, bleeding and flowering and refusing to be pretty. Eighty years, and then a quiet room in Toluca Lake; the body does what it does, and the paint stays. Where is he now? In the work, in the eyes that watched him - a person doesn't disappear when they leave a room, they just hang on the wall of everyone who loved them. ¡Viva! - all of him, teeth and wig and all.

Ha! A man of ten thousand voices - he could have sung my Queen of the Night and my Don Giovanni both, and made the audience weep and laugh in the same measure. Music does not die when the last note sounds; it goes where all beautiful things go, into the ear that remembers. I would have written him an exit fit for an emperor, with a flourish of horns and a joke in the last bar.

Every man who has wrestled suffering into song - and I have known the cold silence of the ear better than any - knows that the final movement is not defeat but resolve. Fate may strike the deafness into the hand, but the will answers with a theme the whole world can hear and march to. He has left the stage; but the echo of his voice is a chord that does not fade, and I would not have it played softly.

A performer is a sort of counterpoint, one voice answering another across the empty air, and he sustained his line with rare invention for five decades. The trumpet sounds and the voice falls silent, as all our little figures must before the great harmony that no hand of ours composed. I would not mourn him as one lost, but as a voice that has finished its phrase and returned to the rest from which all music proceeds.

Well, thank you, thank you very much. You know, a man like that - he gave folks something to hold on to, a little warmth in the dark. I don't know where he is now, but I know he's somewhere with good music, and I hope they've got a piano.

He could turn a shadow into a song and a whisper into a whole world - I know what it is to disappear into a character, and I know what it costs. The children are told to 'Shout' and to 'Heal the World,' and here is a man who let millions of them laugh and shiver at once with just a grin and a gravelly voice. My heart goes out to his family, and to everyone who ever felt that a strange, wonderful uncle on the screen was speaking only to them - that is not a small thing to leave behind. Hee-hee - rest easy, sir; you were, and remain, magic.

Well, wherever he is, we hope he's got a decent piano and a kettle on. He could do the sweet transvestite and the butler and the clown, and he made it look like the most natural thing in the world to be somebody entirely other - that's a bit like what we were after, really, taking your own voice and bending it into shapes nobody'd heard yet. Peaceful at home in Toluca Lake at eighty - that's a good closing chord, that is. All you need is love, and a good wig helps.

A man steps off the stage and the lights don't follow him home. Somewhere past Toluca Lake the highway turns to gravel and the gravel turns to a song nobody's written yet. I knew him a little - greasepaint and a sly grin, the kind of trickster who never told you which door he came through. He's out there now, past the last exit sign, where the mystery keeps its own counsel and the applause is just weather.

He built a whole world out of one raised eyebrow and a wicked little laugh, and that's the thing nobody tells you - the performance was never the mask, it was the truth with the lights on. Eighty years, and he got to spend them being exactly, gloriously strange on purpose. That's the kind of legacy that doesn't get rerecorded by somebody else. Rest easy, king.

By my faith, a man sets sail from every port, and the harbor he seeks is not on any chart. I crossed the Ocean Sea for glory and for gold and for the spread of Christ's name, and I learned that no man, however bold, escapes the westward passage we all must make. He has reached his Indies now - God grant the natives there are kind, and the reckoning just.

In the lands east of the sunrise I have seen how a traveler is mourned - not with closed doors, but with open tables, and the telling of his road. A man who has walked from the narrow streets of the West into the great courts of the Khan leaves behind a map no cartographer can draw, and such maps are followed by generations. The road continues past every gate; we need only keep the lamp burning for the next who comes.

A man like that does not sit in a harbor and wait for the map to be drawn; he sails, and the coasts he finds are his alone. Toluca Lake is no farther from me than the Strait I never got to finish, and every good voyage ends in a port that is not the one the crew intended. I say he steered true, and let the rest keep their charts.

I don't know where he is now. I only know what it is to leave the ground and not know where you are, and to come back to a world that has moved on. He made people laugh in the dark; that is not nothing. But I'd rather not speculate beyond the data.

I left my own last message off the coast of Howland Island - 'one half hour of fuel remains' - and the world has argued ever since about where the Electra came to rest. A man who vanishes quietly in his own bed at Toluca Lake is, by my compass, the lucky one; there is no frozen Pacific, no unanswered radio call, just a life that ran its full course. The real question is never where the body is but where the courage went - and his went into every part he played. Fly on, sir; you made the ground feel like the sky.

Eighty orbits around the sun is no small flight, comrades - from up there you see the whole ball as one, no borders, just cloud and ocean and the place where a man laid down his head. I came back to earth in a field with a parachute and a burnt capsule, and the hardest part was never the launch, it was the landing - coming home to the ordinary, to a chair, to a table, to people who love you. He landed well. That is all any of us can hope for.

He was an artist who happened to act - he understood that the product is the story, and the story has to be beautiful, simple, and true. Most people play one note their whole life; he built a whole orchestra and conducted it from the front row. Genius like that doesn't retire, it just leaves the stage when the work is done - and his work changed how we see villains, clowns, and ourselves.

Look, the universe is under no obligation to keep any of us here, and the only rational answer is to make the departure worth something - which is exactly what we should be doing with every year we have. The real question isn't where one person went; it's whether we're building the kind of civilization where the next great one gets the tools and the time to go further. That's the mission, and the clock is always ticking.

What I love about him is that he never let the world put him in one small box, and he did it with such joy, such playfulness, such a refusal to be diminished. He lived out loud, and when you live out loud, you give other people permission to do the same, and that is a gift that keeps on giving. So tonight I just want to say thank you, Tim, for the courage, and for the reminder that the best life is the one where you show up as exactly who you are.

Where is he now? He's where all men go - and I ain't afraid to say it, because I've been there in the ring, flat on my back, and I got up. He made you laugh, he made you think, he made you feel. That's a kind of victory. And when you've done that, you don't die - you just change weight classes.

I lost my own father and my own brother young, and I know that a man is not truly gone while people still talk of him with a smile - so let them talk. The beautiful game is not only football; it is any gift that makes strangers feel like friends, and this man gave that gift from a screen the way I gave it with a ball. My heart aches for his family at Toluca Lake, but I will not wear black for him - I will clap, the way the stands did when I left the field. Obrigado, professor; you played the whole ninety minutes well.

You know, the thing about a good villain is that he has to be more fun than the hero - and nobody understood that better than a certain butler with a wink and a sneer. He built worlds with his voice, and that's the kind of magic we were all chasing in the story department - the kind you can't see but you can feel. Where is he now? Wherever imagination keeps its workshop, I'd wager, probably rehearsing something. Dreams don't clock out, pal - they just move to the next soundstage.