At university I had a brilliant friend. He was delightful company. Everyone spoke highly of him. His academic work was outstanding. Yet he was no dull swot. He threw himself into editing the student rag, persuaded me to write, and was unstintingly generous with his support. Without him, I would probably not have entered the inky trade that has shaped my life in so many weird and sometimes wonderful ways.

My friend was clearly “destined for great things”. Except that he wasn't. Running along a beach in a storm he was struck by lightning. The shock of his death numbed us. But numbness eventually eases. Life goes on. Nobody is irreplaceable. What remains, however - especially when a person dies young - is the most frustrating of legacies: the legacy of “what might have been”.

These memories came back last week after Anthony Minghella's death. I met him once, so can't claim him as a friend in the normal sense. But I nevertheless felt, as I do about many creative geniuses, living and dead, that he enriched my life like a close friend. I would still feel that if he had done nothing else except conceive that astonishing moment in The English Patient when a rapturous Juliette Binoche is sent soaring into the roof of a Tuscan church, flare in hand, to throw a sudden, incandescent light on Piero della Francesca's gorgeous frescoes. To me, that one wordless scene says more about the capacity of love, beauty and art to infuse the spirit and ravish the senses than a million textbooks ever could.

That it also symbolises the meaning of the film - redemption glimpsed in a swirling murk of despair, guilt and imminent mortality, only increases its emotive power. Minghella was certainly a virtuoso director, but also a profound explorer of the human condition. So of course his own death has unleashed a welter of speculation about “what might have been”. Only 54, he could easily have directed six more masterpieces.

But equally, he could have peaked. I don't write that callously, but only as a statement of a possibility. Some geniuses sustain their energies and inspiration for decades. Others dazzle then fizzle. To cite just one obvious example, if Orson Welles had died at 27, after Citizen Kane, we would have been left wondering what heights he might have attained next, rather than pondering the dispiriting succession of half-baked flops that did follow in the subsequent four decades.

Would Mozart have produced twice as many great symphonies and operas had he lived to 70 instead of 35? Would Wilfred Owen have gone on writing heartbreaking poetry, had he not been killed at 25 in the last weeks of the First World War? If so, what would have fuelled his indignation?

If James Dean had lived to 84, rather than 24, would he ever have made another film as good as Rebel Without a Cause? Would Christopher Marlowe, killed in a pub brawl at 29, have gone on to write better plays than his upstart contemporary, William Shakespeare? And would Marilyn Monroe, Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain or Jimi Hendrix have achieved their cult status had they lived to a ripe old age? The Homeric phrase “those whom the gods love die young” is taken to imply that the gods jealously snatch away the best talent for their own edification. But it could easily mean that the gods preserve the reputation of those they love by sparing them a long, depressing decline.

Whether they die young or old, however, artists are assured of immortality. The work lives on. What, though, of ordinary folk? What consolation for a young woman with cancer, or the parents of a child killed in an accident? The flower has been plucked before the bud has opened. That seems arbitrary, cruel, bereft of any redeeming aspect.

Well, perhaps. But in this context I was struck by the Archbishop of Canterbury's Easter sermon. For once, a man with a genius for wrapping interesting ideas in prose so opaque that it defies penetration managed to say something clear and startling. He said that death is inevitable. You may think this is rather old news. But his point is that modern Man is so besotted with the acquisition of material things that he forgets, until too late, that “night must fall on everything we value or understand or hope for”.

I'd go further. Because of huge medical advances I think we now feel we have a “right” to 80 years or more of a good life. We feel cheated if we don't get it, or outraged on behalf of people such as Minghella who are “snatched before their time”. We don't celebrate what is wonderful in short lives; we get fixated on what seems to be missing. We think of those existences as incomplete - like a novel missing its last chapters.

But that's nonsense. Once death arrives, the book is finished. The notion that we can tidy up or even control our own exit is a very modern fallacy. Our ancestors knew better. They treated death as an unwelcome visitor who often knocked at the most inconvenient time. So they were always prepared. They “lived each day as if 'twere the last”.

That's a motto to which we would be wise to return. We don't know how long we have. That fragility is disconcerting, but it should also be energising. Want to do good in the world? Do good today, rather than putting it off till you “have more time”. Want to create something beautiful? Create it now. Want to mend bridges with an old foe? Mend them this instant, while both of you are able to totter over them together. Want to tell someone you love them? Seize the moment. It may not come again.

Minghella seized his moment - truly, madly, deeply. He created films so poignant and so honest that his contribution to humanity's treasure-trove of wisdom is beyond dispute. That's enough. If you lament what might have been, you belittle what was. For, as he showed us when he hoisted Juliette Binoche up to those frescoes, it takes but a single transcendental moment to affirm the whole joy of human existence.

All you need is a little imagination

Did Shakespeare get around more than we thought? As The Times reported yesterday, two Italian academics claim in a new book that Shakespeare must have visited Venice in person - such is the depth of local knowledge that he deploys in The Merchant of Venice and the numerous other plays that he set in Italy.

The notion of Shakespeare as cultural tourist is fascinating - did he fly EasyBard? But I think the academics may be hugely underestimating the power of a first-rate creative imagination to conjure a convincing verbal picture of a location from the tiniest scraps of information.

Remember the great Broadway songwriter Yip Harburg's classic evocation of April in Paris (“ ... Chestnuts in blossom, holiday tables under the trees ... ”)? It's said that he tossed off that immortal ditty in a New York diner on a rainy morning in late November, while desperately scanning travel brochures of Paris - a city he had never visited, in April or any other month.

Come to think of it, I'm pretty sure that the resourceful Harburg never went somewhere over the rainbow to research his other great hit lyric, either.

Uncommonly quiet

Since my rant last week against the compulsory fingerprinting of passengers at Terminal 5 in Heathrow, I've received scores of e-mails, letters and phone calls in support from teachers, lawyers, civil servants, students, business people, even the odd bishop - in fact, from people in every walk of life, except one. To the best of my knowledge, not a single leading politician in any party has voiced even a modicum of concern about this monstrous imposition on British citizens, travelling in their own country, inflicted by BAA, a foreign-owned private company. Good to know that our civil liberties are in such safe hands, isn't it?

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