> Said was taken from us much too soon.
You're absolutely right. And yet we were very lucky to have had him this long. He was told he had 6 months to live 6 years ago due to a rare form of leukemia. And yet he lived to do some of his most touching work, including a lot of memoirs touched off by his visit to Nazareth.
There is a wonderful hour and a half real video webcast of what must be one of his last lectures available at:
http://webcast.berkeley.edu/events/replay.html?event_id=46
It displays him and his humane intelligence at its best. Naturally some of the pre-Iraq war stuff is dated. But the discussion of the Palestinians and Israel is wonderful.
(If you've got a slow dial-up connection, you can turn down the video and just listen it as a real audio broadcast. It's still quite moving.)
Michael