This ia an article from TIME JUNE 14 1999

HEROS AND ICONS

They thrilled us and brought tears to our eyes. And we shaped our lives with the lessons of their fevor and folly, their tragedies and triumphs

 The full moon, brilliant on a cloudless night, can humble even the most heroic monuments. By Manhattan's Central Park , the seven American soliers seem frozen in World War 1. The men in the middle of the squad have bayonets ready for battle. One is injured but willing; another, caught in the arms of a comrade, is in the swoon of death. PRO PATRIA ET GLORIA-" For country and grlory"- their motto reads in granite, barely legible. The infantrymen rise 15 ft. above the ground, an altitude that is microcosmic from the distance of Sea of Tranquility,SIC TRANSIT GLORIA? As much can be said of the statue of Emmeline Pankhurst in London, her Edwardian gown antique against the constantly renewed moon, which has waned and waxed over her and other great men and women. It has lasted; they have gone the way of all flesh. Emmeline who?

 Yet the moon is mute. And the magnificent swift of the cosmos simply marks time: it cannot tell us of history, cannot instruct us  what to remember, what to proscribe, what to avoid. Memory is born of biological time, and it is borne on blood and bone and phlegm. Can the stars shudder at warfare simply by noticing that virtually across the street from the bronze solders, who fought a war spawned in the Balkans, is Yugoslavia's mission to the U.N. And only we can repant of forgetting that Pankhurst and her matronly, overlaced suffragists risked death for the right of women to vote. It is a blood debt.

 We need our heroes to give meaning to time. Human existance , in the words of T.S.Eliot, is made up of "undisciplined squads of emotion," and to articulate our "general mess of imprecision of feeling" we turn to heroes and icons- the nearly sacred modules of humanity with which we parse and our lives. As the fifth installment in our selection of the 100 most important people of the century, TIME has chosen a score who articulate the longings of courage, Mother Teresa's selflessness, Marilyn Monroe's exuberance, Pele's superhuman skills, Anne Frank's immortality. And the parables: the Kennedy melodrama, the latter- day silence of Muhammad Ali, the brutal grace of Bruce Less's art, the all -too- human Diana, Lindbergh's daliance with Hitler. Iconoclame is inherent in every icon, and heroes can wear different faces in the afterlives granted them by history and remembrance.