Jimmy was my best friend in high school in Middletown, N.Y. We were on the swimming team together. We both were under the influence of Alan Ingraham, our high school English teacher, who was a Princeton graduate in philosophy. He is probably why Jim went to Princeton in the same major. In those days we read Ayn Rand and saw our lives unfolding like the heroic and creative individualists suggested by “The Fountainhead.”
Princeton moved Jim away from science and math and toward literature, philosophy, and story telling. Not too long after college he married Tonia Weeks, an artist, who illustrated some of his books. He went to EST, thought a lot about the world, and came up with a beautiful, simple, clear, and elegant book on the essence of Buddism. The book was titled “Nothing.”
I lost touch with him. At some point along the way, he went to Chicago to learn commodity trading. For a while he made a lot of money, but then he lost it all. There was always this tension — should he try to master the world, or should he renounce it all.
Toward the end of his life, he was in California fully in synch with the human potential movement. To all reports, his life gained an integrity then, he made a lot of friends, helped a lot of people, was frequently impoverished, and he discovered and lived what he was made for. For this, there were many who loved him.