You might think we’d run out of names quickly, too, because there are many thousands of stars visible to the unaided eye at night. Fewer than 1,000 stars have proper names, however, so that doesn’t seem like a crisis—which is a good thing because there are hundreds of billions of stars in the Milky Way! So the problem isn’t naming them so much as naming them consistently.
This is a spiritual book, but Johannes’s journey is one into mystery. The novella is never pious or proselytising; the word heaven does not appear. The closest Fosse comes to cliche is an occasional golden halo. When Johannes presses Peter on what it’s like where they are headed, his friend replies, “It is not good or bad, but it is big and calm and it vibrates a little, and it’s bright, if I had to put it into words, but the words don’t say very much”. Definitely not Crouch End, then, but not clouds and cherubim, either. A place beyond words, and so beyond the reach of this book.
In 2006, the cable channel TV Land surveyed the greatest catchphrases in American television. The winner? “Heeeeerrre’s Johnny!” the nightly words, spoken by sidekick Ed McMahon, that brought out Johnny Carson to start another episode of The Tonight Show, the still-running NBC late-night franchise that he hosted for 30 years and which remains indelibly identified with him. Even today, 32 years after Carson presided over his last Tonight Show and nearly 20 years after his death, the phrase endures, no doubt assisted by Jack Nicholson’s sinister spin on it in The Shining.
In his posthumously published new biography, Carson the Magnificent, Bill Zehme reports that “a recalculation of [Carson’s] small-screen hours cautiously translated, in conventional terms, to more than 2,500 movies broadcast live.” As no less a small-screen authority than Walter Conkrite put it, Carson became “the most durable performer in the whole history of television.” Cronkite himself was dubbed the Most Trusted Man in America, but as Zehme writes, “all forthcoming evidence could suggest that Second Most may better apply.”