The Measure of A Man, By Sidney Poitier

Kamis ini jatahnya nulis tentang Literary, aku mau posting tentang bukunya Sidney Poitier, The Measure of A Man, a spiritual autobiography. Buku ini nangkring jadi penghuni rak perpustakaan kami setelah dibeli Herlan dari toko buku yang ada di Bandara Adi Sucipto, Yogyakarta beberapa waktu yang lalu.
Sidney Poitier, lelaki kulit hitam kelahiran 20 Februari 1927, dari lingkungan miskin di Cat Island Bahama menjelma menjadi bintang Hollywood, pemenang Academy Award sebagai best actor di film Lilies of the Field (1963), dan bermain bagus di film The Defiant Ones, A Patch of Blue, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner dan To Sir, With Love. Kalo liat judul filmnya, orang yg setengah tuwir kayak akupun kayaknya nggak pernah deh nonton, film kuno banget. Ngefans sebagai aktor ke Sidney juga kagak (gimana ngefans wong nonton filmnya aja gak pernah). Tapi aku serasa mengenalnya dengan baik dg membaca buku otobiografinya ini.
Diterbitkan oleh HarperSanFrancisco (A Division of HarperCollinPublishers), tahun 2000, buku 255 halaman ini bercerita tentang kehidupan Sidney Poitier, mulai dari masa kecilnya di Bahama, masa remajanya, masa suksesnya sebagai bintang Hollywood dan pandangan introspektifnya terhadap hidupnya sebagai anak, suami, ayah dan seorang aktor.
Buku ini sesungguhnya bercerita tentang kehidupan bukan sekedar kehidupan makhluk bernama Sidney Poitier. Banyak pelajaran tentang kehidupan yang bisa kita ambil dari buku ini, tentang pengorbanan dan komitmen, kebanggaan dan kerendahan hati, kemarahan dan pemberian maaf serta harga kepantasan untuk menghargai integritas seorang aktor. Ya, Sidney berhasil membawa kita tidak sekedar mengenalnya, tetapi juga (semoga) memahami tentang bermaknanya kehidupan ini. Seperti yang ditulisnya...
.....I decided that I wanted to write a book about life. Just life itself. What I’ve learned by living more than seventy years of it. What I absorbed through my early experiences in a certain time and place, and what I absorbed, certainly without knowing it, through the blood of my parents, and through the blood of their parents before them.
.....I felt called to write about certain values, such as integrity and commitment, faith and forgiveness, about the virtues of simplicity, about the difference between ‘amusing ourselves to death’ and finding meaningful pleasures, even joy. But I have no wish to play the pontificating fool, pretending that I've suddenly come up with the answers to all life's questions. Quite the contrary, I began this book as an exploration, an exercise in selfquestioning. In other words, I wanted to find out, as I looked back at a long and complicated life, with many twists and turns, how well I've done at measuring up to the values I myself have set......
Terdiri dari sebelas bab, dengan pilihan kata sederhana, bersahabat dan menyentuh. Favoritku adalah bab terakhir berjudul ‘The Measure of A Man’ yang menceritakan mimpinya bersama sahabatnya, Charley Blackwell, yang menutup buku ini dengan bahasa yang sangat indah, sangat menyentuh dan sarat makna...
......Human life is a highly imperfect system, filled with subordinate imperfections all the way down. The only thing we know for sure is that in another eight billion years it will all be over. Our sun will have spent itself; and the day it expires, you’ll hear the crunch all over this solar system, because then everything will turn to absolute zero.
....But you can’t live focused on that. You can’t hang on to that. Anyway, luckily we puny individuals have only seventy-five or eighty-two or ninety-six years to look forward to, which is still a snap in the overall impenetrableness of time. So what we do is we stay within the context of what’s practical, what’s real, what dreams can be fashioned into reality, what values can send us to bed comfortably and make us courageus enough to face our end with character.
...That’s what we’re seeking. That’s what it’s all about, you know? We’re all of us little greedy. (Some of us are plenty greedy.) We’re all somewhat courageus, and we’re all considerably cowardly. We’re all imperfect, and life simply a perpetual, unending struggle against those imperfections......