From a full-page advertisement in the November 22, 1993, issue of Daily Variety. The ad, a tribute to River Phoenix, the actor, was signed by "Brief Candle," a pseudonym for Joel Hoffman, a little-known actor who placed the ad at an estimated cost of $2,800. Phoenix died on October 31, 1993, after collapsing outside a Los Angeles nightclub from an overdose of cocaine and morphine.

I returned to my van and read the story in the Calendar section of the L.A. Times: River Phoenix collapses, dies. I let myself cry. Oh, River, part of me surely dies with you. You were the first of my contemporaries younger than I whom I came to admire. I was both jealous of your career and so very proud of you. I feel like a tree ripped from Mother Earth. I wish I had someone to hold right now who understands my fraternity with you, someone through whose embrace I might root myself again. When I looked at you, it was as though I was looking at myself. Maybe it is for myself that I weep, like Margaret in Gerard Manley Hopkins's poem, whose breast shudders upon correlating autumn's falling leaves with her own inevitable demise. No doubt there will be talk of drugs and sordid clubs, but for all the I-told-you-so piety, your absence will be no more comprehensible to me. Who among us has not bent to that innate need to self-destruct? It is your breed of actor that keeps alive the mystique of craft. Only a few of us could have played My Private Idaho. We are the men whose identities are an amalgamation of others'; we are the men who know a thousand souls, perhaps at the expense of knowing our own. The Aquarian Age may crumble and blow down the streets like an empty Coke can, but your river is not quieted: it swells in the heart and bleeds from the eyes. I dedicate my career to the memory of yours.

Good night, sweet prince of cinema.
Adieu, adieu, adieu.
You have shuffled off your mortal coil,
Which we shall care for now.
May better realms await you.

†