Attached is the Eulogy delivered by Peter Tesch on 23 December 2020 in Sydney at the Memorial Service to commemorate Glenn Waller. It is in a lovely language which speaks Glenn’s existence into life. Unfortunately, I was not there.
Peter’s eulogy, as indeed any insightful and linguistically evocative eulogy, prompts stray reflections. Here is one. Socrates to Confucius to Shankaracharya extolled the precept that the beginning of wisdom is the word. Even the very core of human existence, the concept of the passing of time, can not exist without language to describe it. Watch, watch, watch your words and the words of others.
Another digression in this perhaps stretched context. Moving from a promising career as a Chartered Accountant to University and then Foreign Affairs, I gradually locomated from understanding the wisdom of accurately expressing human material transactions to understanding the value of words. I owe much for this (still ongoing) transition to ANU Professors Finn Crisp (Politics and International Relations) and Crawford (Chancellor, All issues Indian, and one of the famous seven ‘dwarfs’ who rebuilt Australia post WWII), and to Kyle Wilson, the diplomat’s diplomat with a human face. And I keep Peter’s linguistic acrobatics in view.
More observations to come…………………….
