Bummy Davis was shot four times. He was only 26 years old. A lot of people thought he could have become a welterweight champ. His manager and trainer, Johnny Attell, thought that Bummy could have gone right to the top.

One of my mother’s cousins grew up next door to Bummy in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn in the 1920s. I quizzed cousin Joe about his memories of Bummy Davis, for I have been a boxing fan since age 12 and have been a sponge when it comes to soaking up boxing information. My knowledge of Bummy had been, at best, sketchy, and I wanted to learn from an actual witness. Here’s what I was told:

“Bummy’s real name was Avrum Davidoff, but he was known to the kids in the neighborhood as Al. His dad owned one of those old-fashioned candy stores; you know, ones with soda fountains and a row of twirling stools and racks of comic books. You’d buy an egg cream or a cherry Coke and thumb your way through some comics. Old man Davidoff never made us pay for the comics, unless we didn’t put them back on the racks. He really didn’t need the money from comics: He had better sources of income.” 

“It was during Prohibition, and Davidoff was selling bootleg booze out of the back of the store. Little Bummy was his lookout. If a cop was passing by or coming in for a pack of cigarettes, the kid alerted his dad, who would shut down the back of the store. Old man Davidoff never got caught, and, though all the neighbors knew what he was doing, no one ever squealed on him.”

“Al had two older brothers, and it was thought that they might have been working for Murder Inc., not as killers, but as debt collectors. Of course, if they came calling, debtors knew who backed them up, and so they always paid up. The collectors got a percentage, just like collection agencies do.”

“Bummy never had anything to do with that mob, was never interested in joining them. He always wanted to be a fighter. One day, when I was a teenager, I saw Bummy actually bump against Abe Reles on the street. You know who Reles was? He was known as Kid Twist for the way he killed people for Murder Inc. Well, Reles cursed at the kid, and Bummy told him to fuck off. Reles knew that Bummy was a tough kid, on his way to becoming a professional boxer, and so he just walked away. You can imagine what that encounter did for Bummy’s reputation with us kids!”

“Eventually, my dad moved us to the suburbs, where he had bought a nice house. Though I didn’t see Bummy in Brownsville anymore, I would go to his fights. The most amazing was against Fritzie Zivic. Right away, Zivic thumbed Bummy in one eye, then the other. And the ref did nothing. Bummy complained about it, but still the ref did nothing. Bummy said the hell with it and went after Zivic, pounding him with several low blows. This time the ref stepped in and wanted to give the fight to Zivic. That infuriated Bummy, so he kicked the ref, and all hell broke loose. Fans were screaming and throwing objects into the ring. Cops were called. Bummy was fined and his boxing license was revoked. He eventually got it back, but his career had its highs and lows. In 1945, after he got out of the Army, he fought Rocky Graziano and suffered a technical knockout. He had one more fight, then quit the ring.”

“Bummy had wanted to retire for a few years, but his manager always convinced him to continue. Bummy was tired of fighting, but he wanted to build up a nest egg. He always felt the crowds were against him, especially after he knocked out Tony Canzoneri. He was ready to hang up his gloves and he did. He bought a bar; I think it was called Dudy’s.”

“Well, one night he’s sitting in the back room of the bar with some old pals, including an off-duty cop. I think they were playing cards and just bullshitting, when four holdup punks came into the bar. Bummy saw what was going on and confronted them. You know he was the kind of guy who would punch first and not bother asking questions. He knocked one guy to the floor, and a second guy shot him in the neck. The holdup guys took off, and Bummy put a napkin or handkerchief to his wound and ran after his attackers. He was gaining on them, when one of the thieves turned around and fired three more bullets into Bummy. He died on the sidewalk and became a hero in all the news stories. The off-duty cop ran out of the bar and wounded one of the punks, but he could not stop them. They got away, but not for long. The cop was a good friend of Bummy and he tracked down the killers.”

“How did Al get the name Bummy?” I asked, changing the subject.

“I’m not sure, but I heard that Johnny Attell told him that Avrum Davidoff didn’t sound like a tough guy fighter and so no one would come to see him box. He renamed him Al (Bummy) Davis. And you know what? Bummy, regardless of his name, was a genuine tough guy, and not just in the ring and when facing down Abe Reles, but especially when he chased those punks who tried to stick up his bar.”

“After the cop tracked down the killers were they tried and sentenced?”

“Yup. They all did major time in prisons and never forgot that they had made a big mistake when taking on one of the toughest young fighters who came out of Brownsville, which you know produced a number of tough boxers. But of them all, Bummy was unique, a true original.”

Jeffrey Sussman is the author of “Max Baer and Barney Ross: Jewish Heroes of Boxing,” published by Rowman & Littlefield and recently optioned by an independent film production company. He lives part time in East Hampton.

Each of us who is hard of hearing faces a dilemma. We dislike conceding or explaining our deafness, and we want to hear as much as we can. We can’t have it both ways, advertisements of miracle miniature hearing aids notwithstanding.

We can’t do our best to comprehend what we are hearing and hide our hearing defect. Not for long. King Goa VI of Portugal might have come close to it in the early 1800s when he commissioned an acoustical throne with ear trumpets concealed behind the decorative lion mouth entries to the arm rests. The device emerged at his head as tubes he snugged into his ears. The king could sit back and hear in regal repose while the “lions” amplified the voices of his kneeling subjects. But certainly occasions arose when the king, on or off his throne, had to bend to hear. We all do.

In response, we develop a kind of aural foreign policy we refer to when deciding how much we will bend. We use it to resolve two questions: Under what circumstances do we conceal, concede, or actively discuss our deafness? And under what circumstances will we strive to hear or allow ourselves not to hear?

The decisions we reach in such matters are always lonely. I dislike mentioning this, as hearing loss is not fatal or disfiguring. However, what we must contend with is far more crippling than the hearing population realizes. We are more than a little bit cut off from the world, from the sounds that help make us whole, that please us or warn us of danger or that spoken softly by mothers and lovers assure us that we are cherished. No matter how “moderate” or “mild” our loss is classified, we can rarely participate in lusty conversations or dinner table chitchat, follow dialogue in a movie, or hear the songs of birds or the punch line of a joke when the joke teller’s voice tends to drift into mumble. 

Equally troubling, our shortfalls of comprehension are often taken personally by people addressing us, arousing anger and assertions that we could really hear better if only we’d try harder. It is no accident that the word “unhearing” can mean either deafness or not listening.

In determining my aural foreign policy, I have learned much from people who are deaf, who have virtually no residual hearing and find it difficult if not impossible to communicate by voice even if they have lip-reading proficiency and hearing aids.

The deaf refuse to cringe or conceal. Rather, they are declaring with their conspicuous hand sign language (which just a generation ago was widely maligned by lip-reading-oriented educators as coarse and “inappropriate”) that they are truly interested in knowing what one is saying to them and that they require equal respect in return.

Deaf groups are astonishingly successful advocates for their cause. With less than 5 percent of the hard of hearing’s population and modest financial resources, they have brought the country captioning for TV, telephones, and cinemas. They were in the forefront, along with the mobility-impaired, as lobbyists for the Americans With Disabilities Act of 1990. And when the board of their university, Gallaudet in Washington, D.C., declined to appoint a deaf president, as if no deaf person could be competent to lead an advanced institution of learning, the students went on strike and won.

On the other hand, an overwhelming number of us who are hard of hearing allow ourselves to be glibly psychologized by the hearing-aid industry, audiologists, and otolaryngologists with pseudoscientific, financially self-serving theories that we all prefer hiding our loss to hearing competently. As a result, we pay $8,000 for a pair of hideable hearing aids that the Veterans Administration pays barely $1,000 for and that probably between the two of them contain less than $40 worth of parts.

In my experience, these tiny aids, for all their technological sophistication, are less effective than a low-tech hearing aid I easily assemble myself for less than $400 from off-the-shelf microphones, amplifiers, and earphones that are available from audio parts suppliers. Consider trying this. Believe me, I am no techie. If I can assemble a superior device for meetings and noisy social occasions, anyone can. It’s as simple as plugging in a lamp.

In addition, we accept mumbling speech from TV personalities. Chuck Todd, Andrea Mitchell, and Chris Matthews of MSNBC are fine examples of inaudibility. Matthews rata-tat-tats as if he’s calling a dog race. We also settle for indecipherable speech from overseas call centers that even normal hearing operators on my TTY printout system often report to be “inaudible” to them.

The next time Staples presents you with a sales agent you cannot understand, ask to speak with a supervisor about it and within a minute you will be hearing a crystal clear sales agent from our Midwest or Nova Scotia.

Most seriously, I believe, we too readily accept the denigration that we could hear well enough or read lips well enough if we’d only try hard enough. As an old fart raised during the Depression, I am foursquare for effort. But though helpful, lip-reading is not up to the job. Too many sounds look identical on the lips, “p,” “b,” and “m,” for example. Many others, such as “ka,” “ga,” and “ah,” come from the back of the mouth and are not visible.

We can start standing up for ourselves right here in East Hampton, where hearing access provisions of the Americans With Disabilities Act and our own town disabilities code, enacted in 2002, have long been disregarded with bipartisan complacency inertia by a sequence of town boards, justice court officials, and our inert town disabilities advisory board.

Last winter, when I was in court, the legally required FM assistive listening system was so distorted I had to lend Justice Tekulsky my handheld FM transmitter in order to know what he was saying to me. Also contrary to the law, no signs were conspicuously posted announcing the availability of assistive listening devices for those who need them.

Perhaps we can start there, with proper signage and maintenance.

To me, it’s a matter of my survival as a whole person. When we don’t hear enough to converse with our friends, neighbors, and elected leaders we are fenced in, apart from our community, and excluded from our rights as citizens.

According to the United States Department of Health and Human Services, approximately 8.6 percent of the U.S. population over 3 years of age is hearing impaired. In East Hampton, that’s about 1,800 year-round residents.

Let’s not be defensive about it. The laws are on our side. Their implementation would not be expensive or difficult.

Richard Rosenthal’s hearing was damaged by the noise of gunfire in World War II. He lives in East Hampton.

Thirty years ago, my life took a tangential turn in the Tibetan capital of Lhasa when Chinese police fired on unarmed Tibetan men, women, children, and monks on China’s National Day.

On July 4, 1987, my climbing friend John Ackerly and I flew one-way to Hong Kong and traveled overland across China to the Tibetan side of Everest. The “granite in our brains” at Dartmouth College had propelled us to scour cliffs across the United States, spend seasons on Yosemite’s big walls, and to go mountaineering in Peru. Going to the Himalayas was the logical next step. 

After John graduated from American University’s law school in Washington, D.C., and I finished at the State University at Buffalo’s school of medicine, John agreed to go to Tibet on “one” condition: We could not take a tent, sleeping bags, or climbing gear. “We’ll travel with pilgrims and nomads,” John mused, “like explorers from previous centuries.” After John “Quixote” and I got to 22,000 feet in our sneakers, we hitchhiked back to Lhasa.

Just as we were starting to regain lost kilos and explore the Tibetan quarter, John photographed the largest independence demonstrations against Chinese rule since the Dalai Lama fled into exile in 1959. When wounded Tibetans were taken from the People’s Hospital to prison, I sneaked out to treat people hiding in their homes and monasteries. In addition to Tibetans dying from gunshot wounds, blunt trauma, infections, and internal bleeding, I encountered the victims of torture, and something worse.

As I was cleaning the entrance and exit wounds through one man’s calf, I asked his wife, Tashi, if she had any children. It was clear from her expression that I had committed a faux pas. When she did speak, she recounted how the previous year her work unit leader noticed she was pregnant and told her to go to the People’s Hospital. Tashi was trying to hide her pregnancy because she did not have permission to have a child.

At the Lhasa People’s Hospital, a doctor gave an injection into her abdomen that made her go into labor. She heard her baby cry twice, once when his head presented in the birth canal. The last, and most traumatic, was when the doctor injected the soft spot of the boy’s forehead, killing him. The next day, Tashi was sterilized by tubal ligation before she went home.

A handful of overland travelers who had seen China’s brutal crackdown in Tibet tried to stay as long as they could to document a city under siege. Thousands of Chinese soldiers surrounded the Tibetan quarter of Lhasa and began house-to-house searches. Those who were wounded, or in possession of an image of the Dalai Lama, were dragged from their homes and taken to Drapchi Prison. Overland travelers were stripped of their film and herded onto buses.

When John and I landed in Katmandu and New Delhi, reporters asked why Tibetans had taken guns from Chinese police and shot Tibetans. When we described Chinese police firing into unarmed crowds, we were able to refute the Chinese propaganda at that time. We also learned that the Dalai Lama had invited us to Dharamsala, India, home to thriving Tibetan culture in exile.

The Dalai Lama was saddened to hear that Tibetan monks — who had dedicated their lives to nonviolence — had thrown rocks at Chinese soldiers. He also understood that this was a normal reaction to extreme stress.

His Holiness listened intently as John described his impressions of Lhasa before the riots: more Chinese immigrants than Tibetans, children not learning their own language in schools, and monks who said they were “workers in a museum.”

His Holiness peppered us with questions about everyone who was killed: “How many people were in the crowds?” “How many Tibetans worked for the police?” And “Did any Tibetan policeman shoot into the crowd?” 

When John gave His Holiness a handful of bullet casings, he laughed. “Some people bring me flowers. You bring me bullets!” Before we left, His Holiness admonished, “Do not hate the Chinese for what they are doing. The Chinese are good people. It is governments that make trouble.” 

In Washington, after addressing the Congressional Human Rights Caucus and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, John and I published a dozen articles and reports on the underside of China’s military occupation of Tibet that were in no danger of becoming best sellers. We also accepted more than 100 invitations to address high schools, colleges, and human rights organizations across North America. At every large university after our slideshow ended, angry Chinese students (who had never been to Tibet) denounced us and said that Tibet was an “internal affair of China.” This was exactly what we had heard from the U.S. State Department.

Human rights investigations are inherently frustrating. It can take hours to interview someone before he or she feels comfortable talking about suffering experienced or inflicted. When John started working for the International Campaign for Tibet, and I did my residency at St. Vincent’s Hospital in New York City, we spent our free time interviewing Tibetan refugees in India and Nepal. This culminated in a report published by Physicians for Human Rights in 1989, “The Suppression of a People: Accounts of Torture and Imprisonment in Tibet.” One month after the report, while testifying before the House Foreign Operations Subcommittee, several congressmen queried, “How did you know who these people were?” “How did you know where they came from?” “How can you trust refugees?”

John and I had to agree. On-site information was much better than refugee accounts. For the remainder of the 1980s and 1990s, John and I returned separately seven times to Tibet to document the underside of China’s military occupation. John started photographing China’s prisons in Lhasa — Sangyip, Drapchi, Utitod, and Titdhu — and returned to labor camps in Xining, the Tang Karmo Valley, and China’s gulag in Qinghai. What he learned was shocking.

The primary purpose of torture is to extract information. Tortures include beatings with electric prods, suspensions, submersions, dogs, exposure to extreme temperatures, and malnutrition. Because Tibet has many different cultures and guards, there are a wide variety of tortures with no holds barred. The worst tortures are reserved for women, especially nuns, who are violated and raped with electric batons.

If a Tibetan prisoner cooperates with a Chinese interrogator, divulges “agents of the Dalai clique,” and proclaims that “Tibet is part of China,” he or she will be treated leniently. Suffering is prolonged as long as possible for prisoners who defy their captors. If these prisoners survive and are released, the debilitated shell of their former self is a warning to anyone who defies Chinese occupation.

On one trip to 20 People’s Hospitals in Lhasa and remote regions of Amdo and Kham in the 1990s, I documented dozens of coerced abortions and sterilizations, and confirmed 10 times that many. Until recently, China’s national family-planning policy allowed Chinese women in the mainland to have only one child, while minority women were allowed to have two children, but there were many restrictions. Tibetan women must be married and have permission from their work unit leader to have a first child, and wait four years before having a second child. 

There is a pressure continuum throughout Tibet. Women with unauthorized pregnancies who go to a People’s Hospital are at extreme risk for coerced abortion, sterilization, and, if the child is born, infanticide. Even if the family can afford to pay an exorbitant fine — often several years’ salary — the parents face demotion, and the unauthorized child will not get a ration card for basic food staples. Unauthorized children are not able to go to school, work, or travel.

As Chinese immigrants outnumber Tibetans in towns and cities, Tibetan Buddhism is suppressed, Tibetan children are not able to learn their own language in schools, and more Tibetan women are sterilized, I am afraid that China’s military occupation of Tibet is a slow, deliberate process of genocide.

In 2004, a small human rights organization in Spain — the Comite de Apoyo al Tibet — filed a lawsuit against Jiang Zemin, China’s past president and head of the People’s Liberation Army, and Li Peng, China’s past prime minister, for committing crimes against humanity in Tibet. Under the principle of universal jurisdiction, any country signatory to international treaties has a duty to bring charges against the perpetrators of crimes against humanity that are being committed in countries that do not have independent judiciaries. The Spanish National Court used this principle to have General Pinochet arrested in 1998 for committing crimes against humanity in Chile in the 1970s and 1980s.

China and the U.S. State Department thwarted my appearance before the Spanish National Court for seven years. When Judge Ismael Moreno heard my testimony in December 2011, he accepted 20 kilos of my written, audio, and video documentation taken inside Tibet, and provided money for its translation.

In February 2014, Judge Moreno submitted arrest warrants to Interpol for Jiang Zemin, Li Peng, and five other Chinese officials for committing genocide in Tibet. Five months later, when China pressured the Spanish government to overturn the national court’s finding, I made a documentary film from the footage submitted to that court as an offering to the court of world opinion.

On behalf of six million Tibetans living in Tibet, I want to thank the Madrid International Film Festival for giving “Eye of the Lammergeier” its world premiere on July 13. Buddha willing, the lammergeier will land in the Hamptons and beyond. If the tangential path has taught this accidental filmmaker anything, it is to never give up.

Blake Kerr, M.D., runs Wainscott Walk-In Medical Care. He lives in Water Mill.

“The problem with religion,” said Zero Mostel, “is that it’s devoid of comedy.”

During a major personal milestone (my second bar mitzvah at age 83) I re-encountered religion. 

When I was 13, I agreed with Zero. Religion was without humor. Worse still, I was embarrassed by the requirement that my parents imposed on me: Hebrew school, my first bar mitzvah, synagogue attendance — although I complied. Being Jewish back then was not only too serious, it was too uncomfortable, and even too painful. Casual anti-Semitism existed then, and I was challenged to after-school fistfights in the schoolyard of P.S. 163. Without knowing how to fight and completely unprepared, I somehow held my own, and even bloodied the fat kid who had bragged to his fellow anti-Semites that he would beat me up.

I am prepared to be serious, this time without embarrassment or pain, but with an open mind and an open heart. “History does not repeat itself,” Mark Twain said, “but it does rhyme.” No repeat of fisticuffs this time, but some biblical injunctions do rhyme.

Among some of us who live past the biblical age of three score and 10, there is a quaint Jewish belief that we have entered a “second childhood,” and so we may decide to honor the 70th anniversary of their first bar mitzvah (“son of commandment”) by celebrating a second bar mitzvah. My wife encouraged me to do this as I turned 83. And I like being the center of attention.

As part of this religious service, the candidate reads the week’s portion of the Torah and is required to interpret it for modern listeners. My portion, 70 years ago as now, comes from Leviticus 19 and happens to be: “You shall love your neighbor or fellow as yourself.” (But “you shall not beat up your classmate” might have been welcome long ago.) 

This portion may be the most difficult biblical injunction to follow because we’ve all heard it before, but the trouble with what “everyone knows” is that we don’t know it with enough enthusiasm and conviction to act upon it fully. “People need to be reminded more often than they need to be instructed.” Was Samuel Johnson talking about me? Isn’t it all right for an octogenarian to be serious about serious stuff? Maybe Zero was joking?

Now that I’m 83, I’m amazed at how much Judaism, around for millenniums, has changed in just 70 short years. Of course it’s me who has changed, and change itself has changed. Back then, my Judaism was limited to wanting to be George Gershwin and Albert Einstein. Right now, I just want to be . . . and to be my best Jewish self. 

About a third of people surveyed say they attend houses of worship regularly, and about a third say they seldom or never do. As the Jewish joke goes: “People go to synagogue for different reasons. Schwartz goes to talk to God, and Cohen goes to talk to Schwartz.” I doubt Zero ever attended, but if he did, he would have made us all laugh.

Although “Love your neighbor” may be the hardest commandment to implement, Maimonides interprets this, and Judaism recognizes, that love and emotions cannot be “commanded.” Judaism does not compel faith, it compels action. Judaism is a science of practical ethical behavior and asks only that we perform acts of love and loving-kindness in the hope that these acts lead to love itself.

The healing power of helping others also heals oneself. Self-love doesn’t come from ignoring your faults, but by focusing on your own virtues, and your neighbor’s, by asking, “Do I come across as loving?”

We have a wonderful next-door neighbor. I wash his car and keep an eye on his property. He allows us to borrow some of his 10,000 books (any of which he can discuss). And sometimes I also borrow his ice cream. He visits me when I’m sick. Not orchestrating, but seizing opportunities as they present themselves; deed-intensive kindnesses that happen to be reciprocated.

I re-encountered Judaism and Jewish traditions, without embarrassment, when my parents died in my 40s — a wake-up call — and I said kaddish, the prayer for the dead. I relearned what I had forgotten 70 years ago.

A life-changing event occurred in 1990 when a Jewish émigré refusenik, a distinguished Russian scientist, then driving a taxi, asked me to help him find a job in his physics specialty. A la “love thy fellow,” I made very practical suggestions based on my own experience, which he followed. He found the right job and told his Brighton Beach neighbors (as in “love thy neighbor”), who then flocked to me for advice. 

I formed a nonprofit foundation, developed a syllabus, and co-wrote a book with my wife, Celia, for both Russian and American Ph.D.s, which reached thousands of other scientists who needed career management help. “Love thy fellow” and being a good Jew — a good person — was the subtext, embedded in my finest hour, my true calling.

In my opinion, a good Jew questions dogma, the existence of God, and even a God who makes mistakes.

We physicists question everything, such as “the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in describing our physical universe.” Similarly, I believe religion, and Judaism, can be unreasonably effective as guides to our ethical and moral universe. 

“Love thy neighbor” inspires me to do good deeds, when opportune: visit you when sick, give you a eulogy, lend you books, with no expectation of reciprocity. And, I believe, properly understood, it’s a moral oasis in space and time, an ideal of behavior we can all aspire to visit. 

Six degrees of separation may connect us to seven billion people, but one degree of separation still matters.

Stephen Rosen, who lives part time in East Hampton, will discuss the custom of the second bar mitzvah at Temple Adas Israel in Sag Harbor on July 1 at 10 a.m.

I’m a journalist and an author, and I write mostly about science and the environment. My career has been somewhat roundabout, but like journeys do, mine has come full circle. My journey starts right here in East Hampton.

When I was growing up, great writers abounded in the community, and I wanted to be one. It was more the idea of the writers and their lives that appealed to me than their actual work, to be honest. The prominent writers here when I was a kid were very macho, focused on war stories and gangsters, and I was more inclined toward Virginia Woolf and Henry James. 

I would take long, long walks on the beach, in every season, in the rain and snow, and I would let my mind unfurl long narratives of observation and feeling. I was so sad, I was so happy, I longed for so much. I didn’t even know what I was longing for, and I felt like “real” life was elsewhere, somewhere I was headed to once I graduated from high school and went to college. 

Yet I was immersed in this beautiful place. After an hour or two of walking, the words in my mind ceased. And I would just keep on, now marking pace with the geese honking overhead in the fall, then with the brief electric sunset on the winter beach. In the spring, everything everywhere was green and yearning, not just me. And finally came the great apotheosis of summer. Now I subsumed myself in the ocean, bobbing along in its gigantic currents and waves, at one with the essential rhythm of nature. 

Living with and in this place, I experienced the poem without words that is the essential rhythm of nature.

When I was in my early 20s, I lived in New York City and worked at Esquire magazine. The job was mostly answering phones, making lunch reservations for other people, and typing manuscripts. The great writer in me was not exactly getting unleashed. Everything still felt like it was going to happen in the future and wasn’t happening now. Out of the blue a college friend gave me tickets to hear Joseph Campbell give a series of three lectures. Campbell was a famous public intellectual, the author of a book called “The Hero With a Thousand Faces.” He was sort of like a cross between the Dalai Lama and the guy who wrote “The 4-Hour Workweek.” He had a spiritual message, but he also had a neat plan for a more efficient life full of more of what you want in it. 

Campbell explained that all mythologies, all over the world, have the same pattern. From Buddha to Jesus Christ, all the world’s stories essentially have the same plot, which he called the “hero’s journey.” And he told the audience, as I listened with great attention, that we were all on a hero’s journey. He told us to follow our bliss, the things we loved most to do. “Follow your bliss,” Campbell said, “and the universe will open doors where there were only walls.”

I ended up featuring Campbell and the hero’s journey in my recent book, “Citizen Scientist: Searching for Heroes and Hope in an Age of Extinction.” Campbell himself was a citizen scientist. The term generally refers to a regular person without a Ph.D. who contributes to scientific research. Though he essentially invented a field of knowledge and taught at Sarah Lawrence College for nearly 40 years, Campbell did not have a Ph.D. 

So how did he come to do this? In his 20s, Campbell embarked on his own hero’s journey, part of which involved an expedition to Sitka, Alaska. Campbell helped collect specimens on that journey — starfish (now called sea stars), crabs, sea anemones, and other creatures that live in the intertidal, the habitat right off the coast of Alaska. 

One of the big citizen science projects I participate in and write about is tide-pool monitoring in California. Today we’re trying to figure out something called a sea star wasting syndrome. All up and down the entire West Coast, sea stars have virtually disappeared. It is the biggest marine die-off in human history. Nobody knows exactly why it’s happening, though it is very likely the result of human impacts.

Later in his life Campbell said that this expedition was “the start of it all,” when he began to understand that “myth is nature talking.” He told us that story itself is a key to fulfillment, that it is important that we feel part of a meaningful narrative. 

Today, however, we see that as humans have pursued their individual destinies and heroic journeys, another, bigger story has been unfolding at the same time. Now it is the specimens that we must listen to. They tell us sea stars were abundant in Sitka in the 1930s. They are almost completely absent from the place now. The sea stars are having their heroic journey terminated. 

One way Campbell described the hero’s journey is as a solar cycle. Undoubtedly his experience in the tide pools influenced this idea, because the life of the creatures in the tide pool is intimately twined with the cycles of the sun and the moon. They literally follow the essential rhythm of nature, while Campbell said humans figuratively follow it. The sun comes up; the hero goes out. The sun travels across the sky; the hero has adventures. The sun sets and night comes; the hero is lost, in danger of dying. In this dark time of doubt and unconsciousness, a new awareness is born in the hero. The hero gets help. The sun rises again, and the hero takes this new information he’s realized to his tribe.

As I was writing my book, which is focused on biodiversity loss, how and why it is happening and what we can do about it, I began to realize that actually, our problems with nature stem from our misalignment with the solar cycle. The sun, of course, powers all life on earth. Photosynthesizing plants make food at the bottom of the food chain, which forms the basis for all the biotic interactions that create this temperate environment that is so amenable to human life. We can’t live without those interactions among all the other creatures that are our co-travelers on this journey of life. 

Every day, photosynthesis powers the food chain that supports all the bodies on the earth. But today, humans are using more than photosynthesis provides. How are we doing that? By utilizing the photosynthesis of yesterday, oil that is made of the decomposed and compressed bodies of plants and animals that died a long time ago. You know the problems that we have because of our use of oil. We are thwacking the earth’s systems in a very dangerous way because we are not in alignment with the solar cycle.

And we are doing this to such an extent that we are confronting a mass extinction of plants and animals, and a perilously threatened atmosphere. You’ve probably noticed a paradox at work here. While we are all individuals with our own life histories to fulfill, we are also an aggregate body. We are all part of a mass of humanity that together is in danger of tanking the whole enterprise of biotic life. So does it matter, really, that we are individuals? That, when taken together, our impact is so powerful and inescapable? Does it matter what you do?

Now here’s some very good news. Even as human impacts are putting way too much pressure on other species, human ingenuity has come up with fantastic ways to figure out exactly where and exactly how that is happening. We have developed tools of perception, observation systems that help us get a picture of the wholeness we are part of. Every day satellites circle the earth, taking pictures of where photosynthesis is happening, where deforestation and desertification are happening. Monitoring tools allow us to actually keep track of where fishing vessels are plundering protected waters, for example, so law enforcement can quickly intercede. We can know the whole of what’s going on as never before. 

But here’s the rub. We need individuals — each and every one of us — to participate both in identifying those pictures of what is going on, in spreading community awareness of what is going on, and in putting pressure on law enforcement and other regulatory methods to protect species and ecosystems. This is the practice of citizen science. 

Late in Campbell’s life, he said, actually, the age of the hero’s journey is over. He said the hero’s journey, or the quest of the individual, was useful for cultures when we lived in tribes, but now we live in a global world, we’re all one tribe. Now we have to find a story that we all relate to, regardless of what country we’re from, or what kind of religion we do or do not practice. 

Well, that story found us. Sometimes it’s called climate change or global change. Sometimes it’s called the Anthropocene. Sometimes it’s called mass extinction. And here’s another misalignment at the core of our troubles — we have placed ourselves at the center of the hero’s journey. Turns out, it’s the earth that is actually making a solar cycle or a heroic journey. 

Citizen science helps us understand that. The word “citizen” is sometimes contested. There’s a discussion around this word in the citizen science community because its practitioners don’t want anyone to feel excluded from engaging with it. But the word “citizen” goes back much further in history than our current struggles with immigration. It implies both an individual, the citizen, and the polity to which that citizen belongs. The great naturalist Aldo Leopold called for us to change “the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land community to plain member and citizen of it.”

Growing up here, you feel attuned with nature. When you’ve taken a walk, ridden your bike, seen a fox or a bunny, bobbed in the ocean, caught a wave. You’ve noticed what time of year it is even if only to remind yourself of when it gets dark, late in summer, early in winter. You’ve noticed different species here at different times of year — maybe you’ve gone to see the nesting terns at Indian Wells Beach and been dive-bombed while they defend their territories. 

This experience that you hold in your memory and in your body is a precious template for reconciling your role as an individual and your place in the larger whole. And now your task is to keep in tune with this essential rhythm.

People may be engaged with climate change and “sustainability,” but few are looking beyond the fossil fuel issue to even more prevalent threats to biodiversity, like habitat destruction and population growth. We need more discussions about nature, about what it means to be a plain citizen and how you can all help further the earth’s heroic journey. To this poem without words that has informed and helped shape us who grew up here, this essential rhythm we’ve experienced here, give words. We need to communicate this with each other. How? Let nature be your guide. 

Joseph Campbell was wrong about one thing. The hero’s journey is not over. In fact, we find ourselves in the most exciting, the most terrifying, the most important part of the heroic journey, the pivotal turn of the solar cycle. We are in a dark time of not understanding, of being afraid, and we are threatened to our core. Yet as Campbell himself taught us, this is the time of discovery, of creativity, of spiritual strength, and new awareness. 

“Follow your bliss and the universe will open doors where there were only walls.” Our bliss is right here. Let’s follow it.

This is adapted from a commencement address Mary Ellen Hannibal gave at the Ross School on June 17. She will read from “Citizen Scientist” at the South Fork Natural History Museum in Bridgehampton on June 24 at 3 p.m.

I didn’t emerge from the womb alarmed about climate change. As a young man, I worked offshore in the Gulf of Mexico oil industry. A few years after that I was lured to Alaska by the promise of big money working on the North Slope oil fields. It did not enter my consciousness at the time that I was doing anything bad. As a builder in East Hampton for the last 25 years, I’ve worked on a lot of houses that were designed with little attention to how much energy they used. 

I mention that personal history to point out that I understand that many well-intentioned folks who are working hard trying to feed their families see the political issue of climate change primarily as a threat to their livelihoods. 

Jump to April 29, when I, along with a couple hundred thousand folks from around the country, went to Washington, D.C., for the People’s Climate March to demand that our government take action to stop burning the fossil fuels that are heating up our planet. I’d like to discuss a couple of the signs I saw marchers carrying.

One that had a clever play on words was “It’s not the heat; it’s the stupidity.” While that may give a warm sense of superiority to activists, it is exactly the polarizing attitude that keeps us in gridlock on the issue. Most of the people who fight against action on climate are not stupid. They are just like the man I was 50 years ago: absorbed in the struggle to make a living. And they believe what they are told by the media and the political party they trust.

Another sign said, “We need leaders who are readers.” That I can agree with. Most of us do not have time to spend the hours necessary to study the science and economics ourselves. And I think we all hope that there are smart, dedicated people who listen to the experts, evaluate what is true and what is false, and move us as a society in safe directions. Why wouldn’t they?

Money. Power. A peer-reviewed study from Drexel University revealed that the fossil fuel industry spent $528 million in one seven-year period to cast doubt on the science of climate change. They know they can’t disprove the science. But they can confuse the public with relentless disinformation. That does not include the millions in campaign contributions to legislators who are dependent on that money to stay in office. Ask yourself why the Koch brothers were so open about the billion-dollar fund they had in readiness for the last campaign cycle. It posed an implicit threat to any Republican legislator who dared to endorse climate science.

Which brings me to a third sign carried by a large group of marchers in D.C., a sign that gave me hope: “Republicans for Action on Climate Change.” Science always wins in the end. At some point in the past, new evidence overcame outmoded beliefs, and public opinion showed that people grasped the fact that the world was not flat. The same thing is happening with climate change.

A blue-ribbon group of Republicans, including former Secretaries of State James Baker and George Shultz, former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, and the former head of Walmart, among others, are pushing for legislation on what they call “a conservative climate solution.” Their proposal would not only reduce fossil fuel emissions, it would add jobs, increase gross national product, and save lives. These men understand that the fastest growing segment of the economy is clean energy. Clean energy jobs in America now outnumber fossil fuel jobs by five to one.

Energy from solar and wind is now cheaper than fossil fuels in many applications, and the economies of scale and technological innovations continue to drive the price lower each year. India, which has been cited as a drag on conversion, recently announced a policy to ensure that every new car sold in that country will be electric rather than gasoline-burning by 2030. China has canceled hundreds of planned coal plants and last year alone deployed more solar power than exists in America. 

The Long Island Power Authority, not usually considered to be a stronghold of liberalism, has canceled all plans for building fossil-fuel-burning power plants and is committed to a 90-megawatt wind farm 30 miles off Montauk. That is more electrical power than is used by the entire Town of East Hampton. Gov. Andrew Cuomo calls for 2,400 megawatts of offshore wind power by 2030, which is enough to power 1.25 million homes.

There is understandable and legitimate concern in our fishing community as to how offshore wind will affect their livelihood. In Europe, there was the same concern when this technology was introduced, but today the alarm has subsided, despite thousands of offshore wind turbines there. 

A compilation of studies that can be found on the IOPscience website done on the many offshore wind farms in European waters confirms fears about noise during construction causing temporary changes in marine mammal behavior, but also confirms the reef effect of the structures, as they provide welcome habitat conditions for some species, including cod. No negative effects on fish were found from electromagnetic fields emanating from buried cables. Further study is encouraged, as are careful strategies to lessen the effect on the marine environment, but there was no conclusion that offshore wind systems should be rejected. 

While many fishermen would agree that the catches today are small compared to when their fathers fished, how many are aware of the threat to fishing posed by burning fossil fuels? Most of the CO2 we emit ends up in the ocean. It is changing the pH such that it dissolves the shells of sea creatures, and that includes phytoplankton, the base of the marine food chain. And the slight changes in water temperature are already having dire effects, for example, the bleaching and death of coral reefs, which are the incubator for a large percentage of sea life.

Scientists tell us that continued burning of fossil fuels could gradually lead to the collapse of fishing worldwide, a sobering prediction, since 20 percent of the world’s protein comes from the sea. If you find that far-fetched, you might ask yourself how the buffalo-hunting industry or the commerce in flamingo tongues is doing these days, not to mention the lobster fishing in our waters.

It has been said that we should avoid offshore wind farms to protect fishing, that we should be putting solar panels on roofs. But the sun doesn’t always shine. When a northeaster here blocks the sun, for example, wind turbines will be cranking like crazy. That’s why technologists tell us that wind in conjunction with solar and battery storage and other emerging technologies is a necessary combination that can function as a seamless system to provide the power necessary to run the modern world.

Deep Water Wind, the company building the wind farm off Montauk, is eager to work with the fishing community and resolve issues in a cooperative way. The firm has impressed local officials with its commitment to careful implementation. It employs a system of observation and stops construction when migrating marine mammals are nearby. Aware of the world around them, company officials employ state-of-the-art procedures to minimize disruptions. 

The public should be aware of the many considerations involved in this issue. Fishermen are right to get involved and work to safeguard their way of making a living. But we will all see changes in the way things are done in the future. Continuing all things as we did in the past will spell doom for everyone.

As we contemplate the options before us, it is necessary to remember that the reason we are making this transition is that climate change threatens to bring mega-catastrophe if we continue with business as usual. The choices we make now will determine how much of the world that sustains us will remain to sustain our children.

Don Matheson is a member of Citizens Climate Lobby. He lives in Springs.

A cancer patient recently presented me with a metaphor: “Doctor, you know I feel as though we are both standing on the corner waiting for a bus. The difference between you and me is that I see my bus coming. You have not yet seen yours.”

What does this tell us about the cancer experience? Reference to travel evokes the metaphor that cancer is a journey, a journey like no other. While the diagnosis is no longer considered a death sentence, serious questions about the purpose and meaning of life emerge. All journeys have a beginning and an ending — the cancer journey is not unique in this regard. We are all waiting for our bus, but the schedule is less than perfect. 

When patients are first diagnosed with cancer, the medical impact and decision-making process may seem overwhelming. What with the need to gather information, seek advice and support, and make possibly life-altering decisions, we are faced with a psychological crisis: a crisis in the form of emotional trauma. 

A young woman recently called me and said she was told she had stage two lung cancer. She was a competent, intelligent, well-adjusted young single mother and upon hearing the diagnosis responded immediately with “What do I have to do now?” She was prepared to meet the challenge directly, but then looked at her hand and saw that it was shaking uncontrollably. “I think I have a need for counseling,” she said, and she called Fighting Chance.

On the other hand, a Roman Catholic priest once announced to his congregation that he had cancer. Rather than panic, deny the situation, or seek psychological help, he found the message to be a privilege given to him by God in order to better prepare him for his journey to heaven. For many people, spiritual solutions to understanding the meaning and purpose of life are not to be underestimated.

Fighting Chance is a not-for-profit organization in Sag Harbor founded by Duncan Darrow 15 years ago. When Mr. Darrow’s mother was diagnosed with cancer he found a paucity of services available and few if any roadmaps for how to seek and secure crisis help and follow-up care. He established the organization to meet this need, which has grown steadily as the population of the East End has increased.

Most of the calls to Fighting Chance are not immediate crises after initial diagnosis. My last call was from a young mother whose brother-in-law was diagnosed with cancer. She wanted to know how to tell her three children that their uncle was very sick, and their father would be away to help take care of him. Parenting and changing roles of family members should always be explored when someone is diagnosed with cancer. Changes and coping mechanisms must be viewed as associated with all stages and types of cancer. 

Another recent call involved the wife of a cancer patient. She had been separated from her husband for several months but had returned upon hearing about his diagnosis. She sincerely wanted to assist him with practical matters as well as emotional support, but the disparity in the marriage had not been resolved, and the matter was exacerbated by her return and the challenge of cancer. 

I have come to recognize this early cancer dilemma as falling along a continuum of what has been professionally known as traumatic stress disorder. Early descriptions of what happens to someone when faced with a life-threatening event referred to “shell shock” in World War I and “battle fatigue” in World War II. More recently, we have the diagnostic nomenclature of post-traumatic stress disorder. The difference with the proposed “cancer traumatic stress disorder,” or C.T.S.D., is that the trauma is not experienced in a foxhole but usually in a doctor’s office, and it is not a single event but a repeated one. Anticipatory anxiety and depressive thoughts often follow exposure to multiple traumas when no immediate outcome is in sight. 

Mental health treatment choices often take the form of palliative medication, but a combination of psychotherapy and medication has emerged as the best, most comprehensive approach. At Fighting Chance we provide emotional and cognitive support as well as coping strategies, while removing the financial burden of health care by offering all services free of charge.

Cancer is often emotionally contagious, whereby the family, caregivers, and social network of the patient are affected in what might be called “vicarious C.T.S.D.” At Fighting Chance we have embraced a family approach to counseling and often meet with the spouse, partner, or children of the diagnosed patient in order to assist with their understanding, roles, and emotional reactions as the journey proceeds. 

William J. Di Scipio is a psychologist and the executive director of Fighting Chance. He lives in Amagansett.

Here is a simple fact. The downtown Montauk beach has been destroyed. Sadly, we predicted this would happen. In September of 2014, I wrote an evaluation of the (then) proposed project at the request of the eastern Long Island chapter of the Surfrider Foundation. My letter to the United States Army Corps of Engineers stated the following:

“In short, I have reviewed all documents and maps related to the project and the draft environmental assessment. I conclude that the project design is ill-conceived. The berm will not last and the geotextile bags will be uncovered far before the design life of the project is reached. If the geotextile bags are not destroyed in a storm, they will act as a seawall, narrowing the beach until it disappears (through passive erosion). There is a very high likelihood that the public beach will be lost as the project erodes.”

I don’t point this out to congratulate myself. I believe that anyone could have seen that this would be the outcome. For reasons that still confound me, the Town of East Hampton and even some local environmental groups supported the project. I guess a bunch of “crazy surfers” are easy to dismiss.

Possibly everyone was, and still is, counting on the beach’s being replaced someday through the oft-discussed Fire Island to Montauk Point project that the Corps has been formulating since 1960. This is quite a gamble. In the meantime, the economic and environmental damage could be substantial.

This past year has taught us that it doesn’t take much of a storm to remove the beach in front of the seawall, and the bags can be displaced and torn. As predicted, maintaining the project as designed will be incredibly expensive and time-consuming. So much so, in fact, that the Town of East Hampton wants out of those expensive maintenance requirements.

Initially, we were promised that the Corps would build the project and then the town would assume responsibility for maintaining it: keeping the bags covered, planting dune grass, and maintaining a dry beach in front of the sandbags. I am not sure what local officials thought would happen, but I guess they underestimated the difficulty and cost of holding up their side of the bargain.

Here comes the very bad news. It seems that the Corps is so desperate to turn over the management of this ill-fated project that they are going to let local officials off the hook. After the project is repaired one more time, no one will be responsible for planting dune grass and no one will be expected to maintain a beach in front of the sandbag wall.

The beach in downtown Montauk has been sentenced to death. Yes, it may be resuscitated someday by a full-scale beach nourishment project, but even that will be a short-term fix. And how far into the future is someday?

Given this predictable turn of events, the calls made three years ago by Surfrider members for a real discussion of managed retreat sound pretty sensible. It is time to have a serious discussion about relocating or buying out those properties that are too close to the sea.

Remember, shoreline change doesn’t destroy beaches, it just moves them. The problem comes when there are buildings in the way of that movement.

Moving buildings away from the shore is not a crazy idea. In fact, it was once par for the course in the days long ago when property owners didn’t expect the government to save them from moving shorelines on dynamic islands.

For downtown Montauk, you will eventually have to choose between the buildings and the beach. It is ultimately that simple. Right now, the beach is losing.

Robert S. Young is a coastal geologist and the director of the Program for the Study of Developed Shorelines at Western Carolina University.

Have you ever attended a funeral on a gray morning in February with just a few flakes of snow swirling in the air and then afterward retired to a nearby diner with some of your close family or, depending who was buried, friends? That’s the thing about diners. You don’t go for the food, but for solace. The little booths are like confessionals in which you spill out your angst, or relief — in this case at not being the one who was grimly reaped. 

You don’t go to diners for the food, though there are some exceptions, but for company. If you haven’t yet been initiated to the wonder of diners and are wary of the converted silver train cars that some occupy, try to imagine being part of a congregation and sitting in the pews of a church. 

Barry Levinson’s “Diner” (1982) epitomizes an institution that is basically a repository for memory. The diner that the childhood friends all repair to in the movie represents a place of almost iconic significance where life decisions are made. What more fitting place to memorialize someone who has just passed away?

When you make a reservation at some trendy new restaurant you’re going for a culinary experience, and if the food’s good, it’s going to get in the way of conversation. Try to think of all the meals you’ve had in top-notch restaurants where “Oh, that foie gras was great” or “What a sauce” dominated the conversation and nothing really was accomplished when it came to resolving your broken heart. Why would you want to go to a three-star Michelin restaurant after a funeral or other milestone? The deceased or departed would be quickly forgotten amid the aromas and scents of some chef’s unusual cuisine. 

When you walk into a diner you immediately smell coffee, bacon, frying eggs, and hamburger, odors that require little expenditure of thought or energy. 

One thing about diners that’s also true is that while they don’t feature prepacked fare like Wendy’s, Burger King, or McDonald’s, their menus are characterized by a certain predictability and familiarity. You’re going to have your appetizers (Buffalo chicken wings, nachos, chicken fingers, mozzarella sticks), your omelette section (Western, egg white, feta, Spanish, portobello, cheese), your triple-decker sandwiches (chicken salad or tuna club), your specials of the day (roast turkey or chicken, meatloaf, eggplant parm), your salads (Caesar, Greek, mixed), and soups (matzo ball, chicken noodle, pea). And no restaurant can call itself a diner without the spinning carousel of seven-layer and chocolate mousse cakes and apple and lemon meringue pies.

Today many people go to Starbucks or seek out establishments with catchy theatrical names like Tea and Sympathy. However, if you’re going to script a scene in which a couple are meeting to get a romance off the ground you have to go to a diner, and preferably one with a smart-alecky waitress who isn’t offended by the fact that her clientele haven’t come for the quality of the fare. You can’t smoke in diners these days, but you still get the kind of sturdy saucers and cups that were made to accommodate cigarette butts. Otis Redding’s “Cigarettes and Coffee” is, after all, just the kind of song that used to be found when there were jukeboxes. 

Next time you want to hook up with that special somebody or other to whom you’ve written your little note in French, Un rendezvous, tu et moi, vers deux heures l’apres midi? don’t shoot for ersatz French places with names like L’Express or L’Odeon. Instead meet your beloved at the Good Stuff, 14th off Sixth, or the Gracie Mews on 80th and First, or one of the many named after Greek gods like the Aphrodite, the Dionysius, or the Apollo. The fluorescent lighting won’t be dark or romantic, but there’s a timeless quality to these 24-hour establishments. 

Fitzgerald famously said, “In a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning.” When you’re sitting in a diner, you can be anywhere or nowhere, and that’s just the spot your search (for whatever it is you’re after) will begin.

Francis Levy is the author of the comic novels “Erotomania: A Romance” and “Seven Days in Rio” and of the forthcoming “Tombstone: Not a Western.” He lives part time in Wainscott and blogs at TheScreamingPope.com and on The Huffington Post.

“Feud,” the Bette Davis and Joan Crawford saga on FX, is over. Jessica Lange and Susan Sarandon play Joan and Bette during the filming of the classic “What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?” and beyond. It takes place mostly in the early and mid-1960s and is rather eye-opening concerning inside Hollywood and the infighting.

After some lackluster moments, and too much detail that I had to stay up too late for (I don’t DVR), it drifts to the late ’70s with interviews with women, played by the likes of Kathy Bates and Catherine Zeta-Jones, who knew and worked with the two actresses. (Also, too many commercials.)

Of course, it has to be somewhat fictionalized, but according to all the press on the program it is mostly true. And very dramatic. And very Hollywood diva.

Susan Sarandon as Davis isn’t terribly convincing. Yet she replicates her bug-eyed look, the cigarettes, the slacks, her abrupt way of ending a sentence, her unassuming New England home, and . . . did I mention the cigarettes? And then there’s the variety of the hairstyles from the times — pageboys and bangs and even the baby-doll platinum curly wigs for the making of the “Baby Jane” picture.

Jessica Lange seems better as Joan, in a hairdo that’s mostly upswept and often looks like clubs you see on playing cards. A sort of puffed-up three-leaf clover in jet black surrounding her head. She’s a great actress, and it appears a favorite, in her later years, of Ryan Murphy, the creator, writer, and director of “Feud.” He booked her for his “American Horror Story” series several years ago. (I’ve never seen any of it.)

Oddly, it was Davis as Baby Jane and not Joan who got the Oscar nomination for the film. I say oddly because, for my money, this time around, it will be “Joan” and not “Bette” who will receive the Emmy nod. And, quite possibly, another Emmy win for Jessica.

This “Feud” takes me to the real event: The 1962 movie, black-and-white, wherein the Davis character, Baby Jane Hudson, is rapidly slipping into dangerous madness, torturing and starving the wheelchair-bound Crawford character, Blanche.

“You wouldn’t be able to do these awful things to me if I weren’t still in this chair!” she rails at her sister in one scene.

“But ya are, Blanche! Ya are in that chair!” 

Some years before, Crawford was beautiful and a star. She got her own Oscar for the stunning “Mildred Pierce.” But Davis was making classic film after classic film, winning two Academy Awards, nominated for 11 (and, in my opinion, cheated out of a couple more wins for “All About Eve” and “Baby Jane”).

I came late to Bette. After “Jezebel” and “The Petrified Forest” and the role in which she had the high forehead of Queen Elizabeth. The 1930s Bette Davis I know little of. It was “Now, Voyager” in the early ’40s that got me hooked. My mom was a big Bette Davis fan, and we watched it together on television in the early ’60s. In the early part of that movie, her relationship with her mother, sneaking cigarettes in her bedroom — and those eyebrows! — is fraught with some venom and repression until the mean mom (the marvelous Gladys Cooper) dies. The daughter then enters therapy and soon after emerges from the top of a ship docking in Europe with her elegant new look, her face revealed from under a hat the size of a large dinner plate. Brows tweezed, dressed to the nines, in spectator heels, she is indeed new and improved, but also appears shaky and vulnerable. How Davis can express so much in a look — those Bette Davis eyes. . . .

The rest is romance. And cigarettes, out in the open, with the famous Paul Henreid scene in which he lights two cigarettes at once and hands one to her. She says, as the film ends and the camera pans the skies, “Oh, Jerry, don’t let’s ask for the moon. We have the stars.”

As a teenager, and a naive one at that, I was mesmerized by the idea of a woman falling in love with a married man. (As a married man myself now, I understand.)

“Dark Victory” was around that time, too. A bit earlier, in 1939 — the year of “The Wizard of Oz” and “Gone With the Wind.” I’ve seen it on TV a bunch of times, marvel at the beauty of her best friend, played by Geraldine Fitzgerald, but Davis was pure Davis in it — independent, strong, lively (then, a shift in her attitude when she realizes she has a dark illness, prognosis: negative), with her clever caps covering scars from her brain operation. That role really gave her her walk and her bravado, and, always, the twirling cigarettes.

Then, for me, came “All About Eve.” I don’t remember the first time I saw it (I should!), but sometime in the 1980s I bought the video, and sometime in the ’90s the DVD. I have seen this film more than a hundred times, sometimes just half of it, or part of it as I fell asleep. Still, it always feels fresh. 

There are many scenes in it beyond the famous: “Fasten your seat belts, it’s going to be a bumpy night” at her party in that Edith Head party dress with the brooch by her breast. There are too many perfect Bette moments in that film to get into. And also, performances by others: Thelma Ritter was drop-dead droll in her role as Birdie, Margo’s maid and close companion. Marilyn Monroe did a very sexy cameo, and George Sanders was a bitch of a critic. I loved him, with his sneers and his long cigarette holder.

Every time I see it I marvel at Bette Davis’s performance.

And then: “Baby Jane.” No words. Unfortunately, it cast her as a lunatic and a killer in future films in which she faltered somewhat: “Hush . . . Hush, Sweet Charlotte” by the same “Baby Jane” director, Robert Aldrich, was not nearly as good. “Dead Ringer,” then, too, a disappointment. Joan Crawford also went off the rails afterward with “Strait-Jacket.”

Nowadays, there are other fabulous female actresses: Jessica Lange happens to be one. Meryl Streep, of course. Cate Blanchett. Julianne Moore. Annette Bening. Even the new-ish Sarah Paulson.

But no one, absolutely no one, beats Bette.

Hy Abady’s latest collection of his “Guestwords” essays is “Back in The Star Again Again! Further Stories From the East End. And Beyond.”