I should’ve known better than to publicly announce the topic of my next post on Friday. Events have a disconcerting habit of continuing to occur, regardless of my writing plans. Case in point: the death last week of Arthur Miller must sadly take precedence over my oft-promised musings on the remake of Battlestar Galactica.

I was introduced to Miller in the same way as most people these days, in a high school English class. I remember reading Death of a Salesman and The Crucible, and not really caring for either of them. They were well written and didn’t bore me, the way many required texts did. But they didn’t speak to me either. How could they? I was just a kid. I didn’t have the reference points to connect Miller’s stories with my short and happy life. How could a callow seventeen-year-old boy for whom the whole world seemed within reach possibly relate to the pain of middle-aged Willy Loman, a man on the verge of obsolescence? I simply didn’t “get” what that play was about when I was in high school, just as I didn’t get Hemingway or Fitzgerald or Orwell or a lot of other stuff that I read but wasn’t yet sophisticated enough — or wounded enough — to completely understand.

Time passed. I had some failures and some hurts, like everyone else. I worked some unsatisfying, degrading jobs in which it was abundantly clear that I was one hundred percent expendable. I discovered what it was like to be unexpectedly laid off as well as how much worse it is when you can see it coming. And then I saw a television production of Death of a Salesman with Dustin Hoffman as Loman… and suddenly a tumbler clicked into place, the lock opened, and I understood what this play was about. I saw my own frustrated ambitions and hurt feelings in Hoffman’s eyes, and I was devastated.
In my opinion, Salesman is quite simply one of the truest, most heartbreaking stories ever told. It’s a cliche to describe a character as an “Everyman,” but there is no other word to accurately describe Loman. He is a man we all know and pity, the Loser-with-a-capital-L, the guy who always wanted to be a Big Shot but really never amounted to anything more than a cog on a wheel. His death, his absence from the world, will mean nothing, just as all his labors, his dreams and goals and big talk, have amounted to nothing. He is the guy we all fear becoming, the one that, if we were honest with ourselves, we would grudgingly admit that we probably already are.

I write a lot of celebrity obituaries here on Simple Tricks, and I honestly don’t know whether my three loyal readers are interested in them or not. I can understand why you might not be. A lot of the people who interest me are pretty far below the radar, involved in esoteric pursuits or folks whose day in the sun is long over. To a lot of people in my generation, Arthur Miller probably falls into that last category — his most important works were first performed decades ago, decades before we thirtysomethings were even born.

But in this day and age, for those of us in the prime of our working years who spend our waking hours in some anonymous rat’s-maze of gray-walled cubicles and who live daily with the threat of downsizing, outsourcing, and being obsoleted by the incessant and indifferent march of technology, Death of a Salesman still has power. Maybe it has more power now than it did in those early post-war years of prosperity and optimism in which it first appeared. And the same goes for The Crucible, another play I’ve rediscovered and learned to appreciate since high school; a play about senseless persecution for political and personal gain surely speaks to the age of AM talk radio. Don’t believe me? Just reflect on how many politicians and pundits would sooner perform anatomical impossibilities on themselves than be branded with the label “liberal.”

I hope yet another obituary on this blog isn’t boring to my readers, but I think the passing of a man whose best-known works are still relevant half a century later warrants a moment of reflection. And if Arthur Miller isn’t worth remembering for that, just consider this: he was married to Marilyn Monroe. Skinny, bespectacled, intellectual Arthur Miller was married to the sex goddess of his age. Willy Loman maybe never caught a break, but if Miller could land Marilyn, then there’s hope for geeks everywhere.