This past November, on a Thursday morning, the magician and mentalist Max Maven posted a message to his 4,600 followers on Facebook. For decades, Max had performed all over the world and appeared on dozens of TV shows displaying incredible feats of mindreading. In the magic world, among magicians, Max was known as a prolific inventor of ingenious tricks who made some 1,600 contributions to our performing art under the name Max Maven, which was his stage name, and under his birth name, Phil Goldstein. Max was also our leading scholar, a walking encyclopedia for all things magic. His Los Angeles apartment had stacks of books everywhere to the point that pathways had to be cleared in order to walk through the rooms.
Max could be an imposing figure. On stage he looked a bit like Dracula, his hair meticulously styled with a widow’s peak, his eyes at times heavy with eyeshadow, always dressed in black. And, with his precise but mellifluous way of speaking, arched eyebrow and desert-dry sense of humor, Max also was perceived through all those decades by many in the magic world as arrogant and aloof. It was said that he almost never laughed.
Then, two years ago, Max was diagnosed with glioblastoma, the most aggressive form of brain cancer, a cruel twist of fate for someone who made his living peering into other people’s brains and reading their minds. His doctors told him he didn’t have long to live, but he defied the odds and lived another 17 months, long enough to be honored and feted at some of the largest and most prestigious gatherings of magicians, and rightly so.
This past November 1, Max died, peacefully and surrounded by loved ones. Two days later, these words magically appeared on his Facebook page:
I made my life about words, reading them and writing them. I wish I had a more elegant way of telling you all that I love you.
I had a good run, made wonderful friends, shared many laughs, and I learned a great many things. I learned that magic allows us to be so much bigger than we are. I learned we should be kind to one another and forgive people for being flawed and prideful.
The one thing I know is that we can all do better, and I think we will.
Hidden inside those Facebook words was perhaps Max’s final and best magic trick: He had arranged to speak to his friends from beyond the grave. More than a trick, though, it was an act of love. His closest friends, of whom he had many, knew that Max was not the arrogant, aloof magic celebrity many others made him out to be. And even those of us who, like myself, never met Max in person but learned a great deal from him through his writing and teaching videos, knew that a deep and abiding love for magic stood behind everything he did. He was generous with his vast knowledge of magic—its history, the genealogy of every trick—and nearly every serious book in my magic library includes a thank-you to Max in the author’s acknowledgements.
The fact that Max had arranged for those words to appear after his death was not a big surprise. Even those of us who only knew Max from a distance knew that that was a very Max thing to do, a kindly gotcha. What was surprising was that that deep and abiding love we all knew Max held for magic was eclipsed by his deep and abiding love for all of us in the magic community. “I wish I had a more elegant way of telling you all that I love you,” he wrote. Such a sentiment wasn’t very Max. Yet there it was. And it was, in fact, elegant.
For all that has been said and written about love, all the love songs, sonnets, plays, books, movies, operas, poems, paintings … the haikus, the koans, the quilts, the family recipes, the holiday traditions … the stories, the legends, the myths … for all our explorations of this mysterious force called love, perhaps its greatest attribute is love’s limitless capacity to surprise.
Maybe that is why we keep writing and singing and talking about love. It defies definition, yet we know it when we see it and feel it. It is infinite with possibility, which is both exhilarating and scary. It is mysterious. It can even make a normally reserved guy like Max hurl a tender Valentine out to the world.
Now, one could argue that anyone who knew their end was imminent would be moved to say “I love you” to one and all, and that what Max did was not surprising at all. I can’t speak to that because I have not been in that situation. What I do know is this: Most magicians equate magic with love—love for others and a way of loving the world, as well as a way of loving ourselves. (Yes, magicians need love, too.) It isn’t just about performing tricks and fooling people, although we dearly love to see people’s jaws drop, which simply means we’ve done well.
We know, and appreciate, that when we amaze someone, we have touched their inner child. That is an intimate moment. It is a privilege. To those of us who practice this performing art, there is no greater thrill.
But many of us are philosophers, too, who wonder why magic has such a grip on us, and why it touches other people so. We even wonder why we do it. Magic is hard to do: It must be done perfectly in order to succeed; it is humbling when you fail; and, as the physician-author Atul Gawande once wrote about the healing art of medicine, the training is vast and incomplete.
Infinite with possibility, in other words. Just like love.
And so Max’s words two days after he died were not themselves the real surprise for me. What surprised me was the welling up of love I felt for a guy I never met, a fervent wish that I had, and a wistfulness and sadness, maybe even a little anger, that someone who gave so much to the world through his magic was given only 71 years to ponder the mystery of it all, the mystery he so dearly loved.
The real surprise was the connection I felt as a magician-minister. When Max wrote, “I learned that magic allows us to be so much bigger than we are,” I nodded and thought, “Because that’s what love does, too.”
And then I realized: Magic is love. Love is magic. It allows us to be bigger than we are because infinity is its endgame. (Ponder that for a moment.) The universe, the most infinitesimal concept many of us can imagine, is the greatest symbol of mystery I know, and maybe there is a connection. Maybe love and mystery and the universe are all the same thing, and that the spark of life that began it all, whether you call it the Big Bang or a divinely inspired creation, was simply something we now call love, and that it is embedded in all of us, and that that is why we know it when we feel it. We are being called home.
Recently, some of Max’s closest, dearest magician friends have shared intimate moments about seeing him on his last day. Ben Seidman had a standing agreement with Max that Max would be his walking encyclopedia in exchange for being the only person allowed to smoke in Ben’s car. “Max told me on the day that he died that there is a lot of great magic out there to be discovered,” Ben wrote. “And yes, he meant ‘magic’ in the literature. But I think he also meant magic in the world.”
Magician and author Jamy Ian Swiss, who knew Max for decades, wrote in his tribute to Max in Genii, the leading magicians’ magazine, “He was always trying to make magic better. He was, in truth, trying to make us all better.” Sure puts Max’s last words on Facebook in perspective.
Jamy shared that among his very last words to Max on that last day, he said to Max, “Thank you for caring so much.”
Max sighed and said, “I don’t think I had any choice.”
Do any of us?