A Life Lesson With Bill Campbell

Every day of our life together, Bill and I valued more and more, the privilege of spending our life with each other. We quickly admonished ourselves about any feelings of guilt about our happiness but instead concentrated to understand it as the very evidence we perpetually sought that we were living in the right way. Our happiness was the path towards self-understanding and perpetual bliss.

My life with Bill and his life with me was in a marvelous orbit of shared love, intimacy, mutual trust, tenderness, affection, fun, everything. How can love be profane if it really is love? In my own case, didn’t my relationship with Bill become my true means of enlightenment?

Throughout the 50’s I continued to experience loneliness as an outsider that worried me. It was something I thought about  as I hungered to experience my desire could be part of a devoted all encompassing union as an emotion, not just an idea. In other words I wanted to be a part of a relationship so brilliantly captured by Carson McCullers in her play, “Member of the Wedding” by the phrase the “We of Us.”

After meeting Bill, a different and greater resolve to deal with this need was made by his obvious devotion to me. He gave me a life. He said that when he first saw me he said to himself, “this is what I have been waiting for.”

By the beginning of the 60’s I realized that I had the greatest gift of all – to love and be loved in return. And it has continued to be so to this day. I have realized this shared love is not just about the relationship, but THE WAY. The way to everything else. Any conflict I may have had between my private emotional life and my actual life was resolved on December 6, 1957 when Bill Campbell entered my life. 

-John Hilton, July 2011

(Inspired by Wendy Moffatt’s prologue for “A Great Unrecorded History”, her biography of E.M. Forster.)