December 17

Simón Bolívar died on December 17, 1830, in a borrowed shirt, in a house that was not his, his lungs failing and his fortune gone, the man who had pried half a continent loose from Spain reduced at the last to a sentence that has outlived him: that he had ploughed the sea. He had been called the Liberator. He died convinced he had liberated nothing that would hold. It is a strange thing to set beside the other exits this date has gathered, because December 17 is, more than anything, a gallery of the powerful leaving the room, and the verdicts history hands them could not be further apart.

Consider who shares the day. Leopold II of Belgium died on December 17, 1909, a king who treated the Congo Free State as a private estate and drained it of rubber and lives with a thoroughness that still has no comfortable name. Kim Jong Il, the dynastic ruler of North Korea, died on the same date in 2011, leaving behind a sealed country and a son to inherit it like furniture. Three men who held enormous power over other people, and three sentences history refuses to reconcile: the one who freed and despaired, the one who owned and bled, the one who ruled and vanished into the machinery he built. The same square on the calendar holds the liberator, the plunderer, and the tyrant, and asks nothing of them but that they leave.

And then there is the exit that refuses even to be an exit. On December 17, 1967, Harold Holt, the Prime Minister of Australia, waded into heavy surf near Portsea and was gone. No collapse, no deathbed, no borrowed shirt — simply a man swimming out and the water closing over the place where he had been. He was presumed drowned. There was no body to bury, no last word to quote, only the sea doing what it does and a nation left holding an absence where its head of government used to stand. Power can end in a sickroom or a palace; here it ended in the surf, and the surf kept its reasons.

Against so much leaving, the date offers a quieter kind of presence. Émilie du Châtelet was born on December 17, 1706, and she would spend her life making Newton legible, translating and illuminating the laws by which the very water that took Holt obeys. Francis Beaufort, who died on this date in 1857, gave the world a scale for the wind, a way to read the sea’s mood before it turns. The famous ascent of December 17, 1903 — the Wright brothers lifting off at Kitty Hawk — belongs to a different telling, an arrival on a day so crowded with departures.

What the powerful leave behind, this date suggests, is rarely the thing they intended. Bolívar left republics that survived his despair. Leopold left an indictment. Kim left a border. Holt left only water, and the water kept the rest. The shape of an ending, it turns out, is the one thing none of them got to choose.