This last weekend saw the last of two heroes. On Saturday, Jacques Derrida performed his last great deconstruction. And on Sunday, Christopher Reeve just couldn’t fight the kryptonite.

This last weekend saw the last of two heroes. On Saturday, Jacques Derrida performed his last great deconstruction. And on Sunday, Christopher Reeve just couldn’t fight the kryptonite any longer. These are narrow euphemisms for men who changed the way we see the world, but they save me from having to punch the shark of their passing right on the nose. Jacques was many things, of course: a footballer become literary theorist and, ultimately, great continental thinker with a knack for causing uproar among analytical Anglophone philosophers. He was, as a cause or effect of these things, marvellously glamorous. He was a puzzle-maker whose essays could bring tears to one’s eyes, of joy or pain, and often of both at once. He never changed his mind, and was happy to say so.

And yet he was not many things: football carries all the subtlety and complexity of good literary theory, and is as contested. Reading Derrida is like watching Brazil play football against your home team: you don’t know what magic they are making or how they make it, but it’s spellbinding and brilliant and devastating. He found his nature and stayed with it.

Chistopher was also many things and yet not many things. He became famous by playing Superman, then stayed famous by staying Superman. He was Clark Kent to the end: all the time you felt he had his blue jump suit on beneath his shirt, and his cape tucked in his wheelchair.

It’s great to think that these two men started in an apparently simple, pop-cultural role, and had to change direction to champion their cause. I believe we value them even more highly for staying true to something essential that we loved about them. It’s one thing to change; but it takes prodigious talent to stick to your guns your whole life and still end up a great person.