Booksellers on the Seine, in the shadow of a cathedral.

Nearly forty years ago, in the first flush of our romance, Margot and I sat at a restaurant table looking out on a scene that had been more or less unchanged for centuries. From where we were perched on the Quai de Montebello, on the Left Bank of the Seine, we gazed up at Notre-Dame de Paris, the medieval cathedral that loomed over time and the city from its sacred purchase on the Île de la Cité. It was my first time in Paris. I’d arrived from an archaeological dig in Carthage—once home and hub of an ancient civilization, then, and still, a seaside suburb of Tunis, capital of Tunisia. Margot, who’d lived in Paris for a spell after her college graduation, had flown from New York for an unexpected rendezvous, which she’d announced via a telegram that had summoned me to the dusty Carthaginian post office from the even dustier excavation site on the harbor. Romantic, as I say: we both had heart—and, as pictures reveal, hair—to spare back then.
 
If our eyes left each other to frolic in the imaginative articulation of the cathedral’s faithful stone, ascending to the heights of the spire before falling down across the tracery and mullions of the windowed rose that intimated an interior light and color we could not see from our worldly seats, our gaze would eventually come to ground on the quai across from our outdoor table, where a row of shadowed book stalls might come into momentary, inadvertent focus. (The picture above, which I’ve pulled from the website of the still extant restaurant, Le Montebello, illustrates the view). These open-air book shops were the precincts of les bouquinistes, the booksellers who take their name, and the centuries-old traditions of their trade, from the sixteenth-century peddlers who trafficked in small secondhand volumes called bouquains on the Pont Neuf bridge. So I read recently in the New York Times, in an article by Liz Alderman, where I also learned that the picturesque riverside bookselling was was given permanence, like so much else, by Napoleonic decree in the early nineteenth century, “popularizing the bouquinistes and making them magnets for students, intellectuals and writers like Honoré de Balzac.” A recent accounting puts the number of booksellers at more than 200, the number of stalls under their purview at 900, and the number of volumes in them at around 300,000.
 
But like their bookselling counterparts around the world, les bouquinistes are under siege, their businesses under threat of extinction. “Even before the pandemic,” the Times reports, “the bouquinistes were grappling with the cultural changes that have affected the book business everywhere—like the fact that amid the distractions of technology, people don’t read physical books as much as they used to, and if they do, often turn to Amazon to buy them.” Add the pandemic, with its urgent upending of urban convention and catastrophic constriction of tourism, and circumstances are bleak indeed, as Alderman discovers: “‘We are barely making enough to eat,’ said David Nosek, a former sound engineer who has sold classic literature, modern paintings and antique lithographs near the Louvre for three decades.”
 
“I never imagined it would come to this,” he said, casting his eyes over the empty sidewalk.
       “Still, the bouquinistes have been here since the Middle Ages,” he said. “I’d like to think that the coronavirus won’t finish us off.”
 
The cathedral that provides a majestic backdrop to the venerable, ramshackle book stalls has suffered its own existential peril lately, of course, not posed by plague or pixels, but by fire. The devastating conflagration that broke out beneath the roof of Notre-Dame in April 2019 destroyed its spire and—as flames consumed its record of human enterprise, if not divine inspiration—took the breath of the world away. The imposing Gothic structure, on which construction began in the twelfth century, had grown across the centuries into a symbol of Paris and a preserve of French culture, especially after its renovation in the nineteenth century, a restoration that was a direct consequence of its atmospheric evocation in the pages of Victor Hugo’s wildly popular 1831 novel, Notre-Dame de Paris, better known in English as The Hunchback of Notre-Dame.  
 
Hugo’s tale of the bell ringer Quasimodo and the gypsy Esmeralda is set in 1482, a few decades after Johannes Gutenberg had introduced movable type to Europe. In the first chapter of the novel’s fifth book, the archdeacon of Notre-Dame, Dom Claude Frollo, pointing at a newfangled printed book with one hand and at the façade of the cathedral with the other, exclaims, “Alas, this will kill that.” The chapter that follows, for which the the archdeacon’s last four words provide the title, is an explication of their meaning, a philosophical interruption for which Hugo apologizes to his readers. Buried in Dom Claude’s thought pronouncement, Hugo writes, was “a presentiment that human thought, in changing its form, was about to change its mode of expression; that the dominant idea of each generation would no longer be written with the same matter, and in the same manner; that the book of stone, so solid and so durable, was about to make way for the book of paper, more solid and still more durable.” 
 
How more durable? “In its printed form,” Hugo explains, 
 
thought is more imperishable than ever; it is volatile, irresistible, indestructible. It is mingled with the air. In the days of architecture it made a mountain of itself, and took powerful possession of a century and a place. Now it converts itself into a flock of birds, scatters itself to the four winds, and occupies all points of air and space at once.
 
And just before that:
 
The invention of printing is the greatest event in history. It is the mother of revolution. It is the mode of expression of humanity which is totally renewed; it is human thought stripping off one form and donning another; it is the complete and definitive change of skin of that symbolical serpent which since the days of Adam has represented intelligence.
 
Somewhere among the 300,000 battered books of the bouquinistes, those words, in their original French, are expiring between their covers like caged birds deprived of light and air. The cathedral watching over them has its own struggles to survive, but may well outlast, through the sheer stubbornness of materiality, the printed winged flocks that once encircled it with the animation of new intelligence. 
 
And it’s not lost on me that if I were sitting at a street-side table at Le Montebello today, in the shadow of that damaged yet still glorious Gothic structure, surveying the lonely stalls of booksellers abandoned by browsers as the pandemic shutters Paris’s present, thereby imperiling its past, I might well be scanning my phone out of habit, keeping in touch with not much, yet unable to part my attention from it, in the grip of the daily forgetting our time delivers with such infernal ingenuity, speaking in a dialect that has ten thousand words for distraction.

❦

Shakespeare and Company, the celebrated English-language bookstore at 37, rue de la Bûcherie, is maybe a three-minute walk from where Margot and I sat having lunch on the Quai de Montebello four decades ago. The bookshop was opened in 1951 by George Whitman, assuming, with Sylvia Beach’s blessing, the name that had graced Beach’s shop on rue de l’Odéon from 1919 to 1941, where Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, and Ezra Pound talked about news that would stay news and whence Beach, with bravery as well as editorial boldness, published James Joyce’s Ulysses. Whitman’s reincarnation of the enterprise, now overseen by his daughter, Sylvia, has served as an equally thriving hub for several generations of writers, littérateurs, bohemians, expatriates, and tourists. Friends of mine have crashed there for the night, and a young couple I know got engaged there a couple of years ago. 
 
Like the bouquinistes who line the Seine in their increasingly solitary bookishness, Shakespeare and Company is struggling to make ends meet, and, like the Strand in Manhattan, whose pandemic-induced travails I wrote about in an earlier post, it has appealed to its far-flung customers for support through a new membership model that I invite you to consider. Stores like Shakespeare and Company and the Strand are rare in their reach, but thousands of other less celebrated bookselling enterprises are just as beloved by a loyal coterie, for good bookshops are among the very few public spaces that create an environment in which we can engage in an ongoing exchange with ourselves—call it a soliloquy—in ways that honor our interests with an agency, even an indulgence, the rest of the world seldom allows. 
 
“What is culture?” the French philosopher Simone Weil once asked. She was not without an answer, and her response has always struck me as particularly apt: “The formation of attention.” To play a role in such formation is, to my mind, the raison d’être of a true bookstore; among its stacks and shelves we pursue private inclinations even as we are encouraged to enter the broader conversation a shared culture makes possible.

Or, history and soliloquy.

Even to an inveterate book hound like me, the phone casts a powerful spell. The enervating election drama has only exacerbated its hold. Over the past few weeks, particularly the two running up to November 3rd, I found myself, in the middle of each night, standing in my dark bedroom, feeling for the phone on the top of my dresser, drawn to the promise of its screen by insomniac anxiety. Shielding the phone’s glow from the other side of the room, where Margot slept, I’d open the latest installment of Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American. 

Richardson is an historian whose most recent book is How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America. Her nightly email newsletters have, since some time in 2019, digested political events and connected them to the past with insight and probity. After a friend recommended her writing to me a couple of months back, I became reliant upon her perspective on the day’s news for its calm exposition of the unfolding electoral process and its knowledgeable contextualizing of the often outrageous incidents that process has engendered. 

In the small hours of November 6 (her email was time-stamped 4:04 AM), Richardson described the events of the previous evening, including the incumbent president’s unsettled and unsettling press conference, in which he’d made his first public statements since election night. Richardson’s chronicle began like this:

And still, we wait.

Ballot counting in the 2020 presidential election continues, although it sure looks like Democratic candidate Joe Biden and his running mate Kamala Harris are going to win. 

What has stood out today is the degree to which Trump and his team have governed by creating their own reality. Now that that image is being challenged, they are flailing.

Like most of Richardson’s missives, this one was quite long, and I was nearly 1,200 words into this particular installment, standing in our pitch-dark bedroom, when I came upon a statement that I fully understood but with which, on reflection, I took issue. Considering the president’s performance before the press, she described the scene in a manner that was, by all accounts, quite accurate: “In front of a wall of flags, speaking a low voice and tripping over his words at times, he rambled through a wild attack on the election, claiming it was being stolen from him.”

Then she commented: “It felt Shakespearean, like the desperate attempt of a man who has lost control of the narrative to try to claw it back. . . .” I knew what she meant, but I didn’t quite agree with her, for reasons that struck me as increasingly worth pondering, even after I finally got some sleep later in the week. What was missing from Trump’s appearance was exactly the dimension in which Shakespearean-ness abides: quickened language, aware of its potential power and in pursuit of the expressiveness that might unlock it, capable of parsing the most complex experience as it unfolds but leaving its meaning unfixed and emergent (and maybe even an enigma) to the speaker, but demanding of the audience an engagement, an alertness, that expands its sensibilities even in confusion. 

The soliloquies spoken by the dramatist’s heroes and villains, whether trying to claw back narratives that have overtaken them or assuming or avoiding the roles they’re ordained to play, invoke eloquence as a kind of antidote to existential fear; they create a space in which a search for meaning can operate, whether that search is wallowing (Richard II), murderous (Macbeth), scheming (Richard III), enraged (Lear), or ennobling (Henry V). Their pentameters are proving grounds of human nature; the truths unearthed are in some ways independent of the speaker, spelling out revelations intended or inadvertent, their import incorrigibly plural: they add new meanings every time we encounter them.

Left to its own devices, history is never Shakespearean; Shakespeare made it so by forging a new language equal to bearing the weight of the world and turning it round and round for us to assess. Through that language, he invested the chronicles of Holinshed and Saxo Grammaticus, even Plutarch, with an energy his sources lacked, animating them with dignity or shame, honor or disgrace, nobility or meanness—with mere humanity. In so doing, he gave generations a frame in which to judge the conduct and the consciences of historical actors (to say nothing of their contemporaneous selves), a frame by now so ingrained in our apprehension of public life that we can’t help but hold it up at moments of crisis—if only to our television screen—to measure the mettle of those who would lead us. We want momentous events to feel Shakespearean, but the trappings of events don’t make them so; words do.

Writing in a different context, about how the loss of rich local vocabularies for natural phenomena diminishes our experience of the world outside, Robert Macfarlane has said, “language does not just register experience, it produces it. The contours and colours of words are inseparable from the feelings we create in relation to situations, to others and to places. Language carries a formative as well as an informative impulse.” The experience produced by the language we can read in the White House transcript of the president’s November 5 remarks—blunt, disjunctive, baldly false in its assertion of irregularities—is calculated to be calculating, and too calculating by more than half. It allows no room, at a moment of present urgency and certain future scrutiny, for the incalculable forces of comity or convention or history to share the stage. It’s a whirlpool of will, one intended to pull into it—as it has so powerfully since 2016—the assembled attentions of press and public. What should have felt Shakespearean, then, was something less than that, and the gap itself, given the anxieties of the historical circumstance, was disconcerting.

It would be absurd, of course, to expect any of our public figures to speak with the grace and gravity of Shakespeare; or even, for that matter and alas, to have read Shakespeare with any degree of diligence. But it’s not absurd to expect them to acknowledge, if not command, the sensorium of values Richardson’s “Shakespearean” evokes. If words enact the drama of the body politic, our national stage is now a Twitter feed. The poverty of the language that commands attention on that stage—most effective, because most amplified, when nasty, brutish, and short—is an impoverishment of our experience more broadly, a cul-de-sac of exhortations and unattached superlatives in which we are condemned to fret in anticipation of the next incendiary falsification or pronouncement. Such deficiency of language, in the end, produces the same result, on a national scale, that Dr. Johnson ascribed to a remissness of education in an individual: it leaves us with no rule of action but our present humor.

In the Strand and other book emporia.

“We Need Your Help!” That was the subject line of an email I received on the afternoon of October 23. The body of the message was a letter from Nancy Bass Wyden, proprietor of the Strand bookstore on Broadway and 12th Street in Manhattan. She wrote to Strand customers—“with gratitude, determination and appreciation”—to ask for support of the fabled institution, whose business has been ravaged by the pandemic in the past eight months, its business dropping nearly 70%. 
 
“I grew up in the Strand, or at least that’s the way it felt to me,” Nancy’s letter began, recalling the days of her childhood when her grandfather and father worked side by side; “never did I imagine that the store’s financial situation would become so dire that I would have to write friends and devoted customers for help.”
 
We’ve survived just about everything for 93 years—the Great Depression, two World Wars, big box bookstores, e-books and online behemoths. We are the last of the original 48 bookstores still standing from 4th Avenue’s famous Book Row. Because of the impact of Covid-19, we cannot survive the huge decline in foot-traffic, a near complete loss of tourism, and zero in-store events (compared to 400 events pre-pandemic).
 
Nancy’s plea struck several chords with me, and it clearly resonated with many others, as evidenced by reports of the response it generated in terms of foot traffic and online orders. (The picture above, showing a line of customers snaking around the outside of the store on the day after the email, was taken by my sister, Cathy Guy, who lives around the corner from the Strand.) Personally, I remain grateful to Nancy for the warm welcome she gave to 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die, both in the run-up to publication, when she provided a startling and generous quote for the volume’s dust jacket, and in support of the book once it appeared in October 2018, when it was featured—and piled high—as a Strand staff pick well into 2019. She also hosted me for a packed event at the store that was broadcast on C-SPAN2 Book TV (you can watch it here). No other bookseller did quite so much to make me feel like a real author, just as few other bookstores have made me feel so purposeful as a reader over such an extended period of time: more than half of the Strand’s history, in fact.
 
Those of you who’ve been following my newsletter since I began it a couple of years ago may remember that in one of the earliest issues I announced a new project I was embarking upon, a collection of essays called Lost Learning:
 
I’ve begun sketching out a new book (read: I’ve been taking long walks and letting my thoughts wander) about our search for books and what we find in them, not just as individual readers but as citizens of culture—and on what might happen if we stop looking in the particular directions reading has mapped for our brains, neurologically speaking, and our collective fate, historically speaking.
 
That first episode of Lost Learning begins on the floor of the Strand during a visit on a rainy afternoon in December 2018:
 
The Strand was busy with the inspiriting buzz of a bookstore in the run-up to the holiday, and I was in my own favorite element, happily scanning the many tables of enticing volumes, hoping my eyes would alight — to invoke the words of the longtime majordomo of London’s Heywood Hill bookshop, John Saumarez Smith — upon something that, at the back of my mind, I knew I’d always wanted. Without too much time passing, alight they did, spying a pile of The Earth Dies Streaming, a collection of film criticism by A. S. Hamrah.
 
Flipping through Hamrah’s book, I discovered Orson Welles and T. S. Eliot, and my thoughts took a pleasingly unexpected turn, one that eventually would set me on the path toward a rewarding destination (if Lost Learning is any good, that is). I didn’t know that on that December afternoon, however; I was just filled with a browser’s pleasure:
 
Mostly, though, I was delighted to have discovered once again the pleasure of being taught by serendipity — of experiencing, in the words of Edmund Wilson that I had quoted again and again on my book tour, “the miscellaneous learning of the bookstore, unorganized by any larger purpose.” Any larger purpose, that is, than the passage of a browser’s attention through it.
   I bought the book.
 
You can read that first episode here: Used Books (and also the second, which, following Hamrah from Welles to Eliot, leads, via Virgil and a translation by Seamus Heaney, into the land of the dead). In any case, two years and thirty-thousand-odd words later, I’m approaching the conclusion of that small book that began on the floor of the Strand on that rainy afternoon, the cultivation of its little plot having been seeded by countless volumes found in the same space over the course of several decades; being of a teleological bent, I wonder if it is inauspicious that the final pages of Lost Learning have come into focus in the same week I receive Nancy’s SOS. 
 
To ward off my suspicions, I chose some books as charms to order in response to it, including Don DeLillo’s slim new novel, The Silence, which I read in a sitting last night. It tells the story of what happens when the power goes out on Super Bowl Sunday a few years hence. Well, it’s not a story exactly, but a series of signs and warnings that baffle a small cast of characters thrown back on their metaphorical devices when the real ones on which they rely—television, internet, electric circuits—go blank, and they go blank with them. It’s like a fragmentary, oracular remnant of an ancient modern literature, a lost interlude of a tragedy too slippery to stage. “We have to remember to keep telling ourselves that we’re still alive,” says one voice in The Silence. That has always been what literature has meant to do, which is why Euripides and Don DeLillo are contemporaries. 

❦

 
The Silence is the kind of minor, mysterious work an acolyte like me was thrilled to come upon in the stacks of the Strand all those years ago, pre-internet, when there was no other way to find them. As Nancy Bass Wyden notes in her email, the Strand was once one among several dozen bookstores in the same neighborhood; all those companions are gone now, and have been for some time.

I’d first wandered the Strand’s miles of books when that course of discovery was but one of several—was it dozens?—in the neighborhood, at the tail end of its time as New York’s Book Row, of which the Strand is the solitary survivor, no doubt in part because of its knack for renewal. Making my youthful, eager way through the stacks of the Strand in my formative years, or wandering through the warrens of Biblo & Tannen on Fourth Avenue, or descending into the fathomless basement of Dauber & Pine on Fifth, I’d discover on each foray tracts of unexplored territory—terra incognita of the bookish life—as if the emporiums were expanding underground from one week to the next in a fairy tale of intellectual adventure, luring the hero (that would be me) deeper into labyrinths lined with piles of disorganized tomes to be pawed and pored over—mined—until they revealed some treasure to be toted home and pondered like a relic of a sacred quest.
 
That’s from another section of Lost Learning, in which I consider what I learned in the dusty school for browsers that Fourth Avenue then comprised, and on the gap lost bookstores leave behind.
 
Book hunting, of course, is not so dusty now. It is one of the ironies of the digital age, in fact, that the business of books led the way, via Amazon, into the robotic warehouses of frictionless e-commerce—everything available all the time and just a click away—and marked out the first paths toward the surveillance future we increasingly inhabit at the beck and call and beck again of occult algorithms predicting our longings with inscrutable orthodoxy. Yet for all the ease of search box convenience and cardboard carton delivery, there is something missing. For generations, inveterate browsers have known that books discover us as much as we discover them. Volumes crouch in corners, secrete themselves along the shelves, lie in wait in libraries public or personal until we’re ready for their wisdom, then spring their wits upon us. Worthy books have a way of coming to hand when we’re ripe for them. Such fortune is the browser’s faith, and solace, the first allure of the vocation. But it’s the first rule of e-commerce that discovery be made efficient (this was also, of course, the guiding principle of mass retailing and big-box stores, but those now quaint manifestations of directed shopping lacked the ruthless enforcement of algorithmic certitude). Not only dust but serendipity be damned!
    But discovery made efficient is not discovery at all. The very qualities an old bookstore promoted were escapes from the affronts of the efficiency outside it, the pigeonholes of the projected futures society might have in store. (And if the future seemed projected then, it’s positively programmed now: “Make Google do it!”) Call it procrastination or creativity, browsing is always filled with promise, as, of course, is reading. The first indulges our instincts and the second informs our attention, shaping its quality and thereby describing our presence in the world.
 
And a little later on:
 
We live in an age of algorithms, in which all of human experience is subject to rules of engineering efficiency. That’s marvelous, and even liberating, in many ways. But the most important experiences in life are not efficient. Infancy isn’t efficient, nor is growing up. Education is not efficient, and is less and less education in its true sense the more it pretends to be efficient. Raising children isn’t efficient. Taking care of aging parents isn’t efficient. Falling in love isn’t efficient, and falling out of love is even less so. In fact, thinking is seldom efficient, nor are the revelations we come to about ourselves and the world by living, pondering, and worrying until we learn to be comfortable in our own skin.
    Reading of any kind helps us with the living, pondering, and worrying that shapes us, not so much by delivering instructions as by allowing us the space to discover inspirations and develop our intuitions—space in which we can learn to talk to ourselves more thoughtfully than the press of events usually allows. “Becoming is a secret process,” Heraclitus wrote more than 2,500 years ago, as noted by Guy Davenport in his book of translations of that ancient philosopher. It is, in fact, the age of the book that made second nature the space in which our hearts and minds take shape; it was reading that created what we think of now as the inner life, the secret process of becoming ourselves.

Or, The Uses of History.

A reading life is a mixture of planning and contingency. The former feeds, with steady purpose, the to-be-read piles we build faithfully around the house, marshaling hope against experience; the latter stumbles upon finds in unexpected settings, distracting us into new interests or magnetizing random thoughts into new patterns of meaning. You never know.
 
One of my favorite serendipitous discoveries in the recent past is Joanne B. Freeman’s The Field of Blood, a study—as its subtitle explains—of “violence in Congress and the road to Civil War.” I picked it up nearly two years ago after I met the author when we shared a taxi to the airport in Nashville, Tennessee, where we’d each appeared at the Southern Festival of Books to promote our newly published volumes. Shepherded with our suitcases into the same cab by a festival volunteer, we met in the backseat and chatted amiably on the ride. Freeman—a professor, as I learned, of history and American studies at Yale—exuded a happy alertness, a quality not always found in touring authors, or, for that matter, Ivy League faculty. I enjoyed our twenty-minute conversation and made a mental note to look for her book. 
 
As it turns out, The Field of Blood, despite its subject matter and its academic rigor (battalions of footnotes!), is as animated and inviting as Professor Freeman was in conversation. The story it tells is startling. Replete with characters both larger than life and smaller than a petty grudge, Freeman’s chronicle details the frequent violence—vituperative oratory, overturned furniture, canings (the caning of Senator Charles Sumner on the Senate floor in 1856 is illustrated above), fistfights—that erupted in committee rooms and in legislative sessions on the floors of the House of Representatives and the Senate between 1830 and 1860. We may bemoan the lack of comity in our political life right now, but contemporary disarray seems a pale descendant of the culture of intimidation and bullying that shaped congressional activity in the period Freeman covers. Insult, bravado, posturing, humiliation, death threats, and “honor taunting” were part of common parlance; duels were ever in the offing, and guns and Bowie knives were carried and pulled. 
 
Here’s Freeman’s account of an 1840 session in which a House committee was investigating President Andrew Jackson’s “pet banks” (state depositories for public funds, Freeman explains, that replaced that bugaboo of Jacksonian Democrats, the Bank of the United States):
 
In the days before testifying to the investigative committee, an agent for several of those banks, Reuben M. Whitney, had called [Balie Peyton, Whig congressman from Tennessee] a liar in the press. So when Whitney sneered at Peyton during his testimony, all hell broke loose. Peyton jumped to his feet and threatened lo kill Whitney; [representative Henry Wise, a Virginia Whig], who had been regaling committee members with amusing anecdotes on a couch across the room, caught the drift, rushed over, and joined in. At this point, Whitney jumped to his feet, Peyton reached for his gun, and Wise positioned himself within firing range of Whitney, his hand on his gun, his gaze fixed on Whitney’s hand in his pocket. 

Such dramatic incidents, Freeman illustrates on page after page, were not as uncommon as our generally murky historical understanding of the American nineteenth century might suppose (to say nothing of what we might see through the lenses of the “patriotic history” that the White House has recently been grinding to fit its own myopia). She writes with verve, even humor, without ever diminishing the historical import of her labor in the archives. For narrative coherence, Freeman organizes the rich findings of her research into a broad array of sources through the experience of Benjamin Brown French, a minor New Hampshire politico and newspaper editor from New Hampshire, who migrated to Washington in 1833 to take up clerkship in the House of Representatives. Over the next few decades, Freeman tells us, “first as a House clerk and then as the House Clerk, he spent his time serving congressmen, not all of them hail fellows well met.” In other words, he was a close and reliable witness to the tempers of the legislators as well as the increasingly fraught temper of the time. He also kept a diary and a regular correspondence, and Freeman quotes from both judiciously:

It was one of the things that he liked about his job; when fists flew, he had a ringside seat. He reveled in what he called the “great fight” of 1841, which began when Edward Stanly (W-NC) and Henry Wise (W-VA) exchanged insults. When Wise slugged Stanly, “nearly all the members” rushed over and began pummeling one another in a wild melee. “[T]he Speaker & I had the best chance to see all the fun,” French wrote to his half brother, “& while he stood at his desk pounding & yelling, I stood at mine ‘calm as a summer’s morning’—enjoying the sport, and keeping the minutes of the proceedings!”

That Henry Wise must have been quite a card. But he had plenty of company, as French knew. French saw the peril of the culture of violence Congress not only tolerated, but fostered, and of which the “great fight” was representative:

To French, this wasn’t just a momentary outbreak of congressional chaos. It was the state of the nation. It made the national government seem surprisingly fragile, and in so doing, it put the Union’s survival in doubt. Indeed, maybe this was the beginning of the end. Sitting at home at the end of the day, exhausted and losing hope, he confessed to his sister that he felt like “a mourner, following my Country to its grave.’’ Years from now, he imagined, when the Constitution was “a thing that was, the pen of the historian’’ would date “the commencement of its overthrow’’ to this congressional breakdown and all that it revealed. This was “an era in the history of our Country,” French thought, a period of enormous and eventful change. He was right in ways that he couldn’t even begin to fathom. 

Published in 2018, The Field of Blood was surely the product of years and years of research. I suspect that sentences that ring out like warning bells right now—”National institutions of all kind were under fire at precisely the moment when their influence most mattered”—have a relevance Freeman might not have foreseen as she wrote them. But citizens as well as presidents do well not to underestimate the backward-looking prescience of historians; what the author of The Field of Blood pins to the pages of the past echoes through our present anxiety with resounding force: the American experiment was ever a volatile, combustible one.

❦

 . . . while it lived, the past
Was a rushed present, fretful and unsure.
                          —Richard Wilbur

In her introduction to The Field of Blood, Freeman explains the utility of Benjamin Brown French’s diary in her composition of the pages to follow:
 
A time of unsettled, unbalanced, and unpredictable politics, the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s were uneasy decades of national unknowing. To fully grasp the meaning of that moment, we need to understand the process of discovery of those that lived through it. We need to view events “in forward motion, as they were lived,” with their contingency intact.
 
That’s what thoughtful history delivers: a perspective in which the unsettled nature of the past as it unfolded is given its due, allowing us to understand the responses of historical actors to events as the improvisations they had to be. What we learn from history—from the governmental ingenuity of the Founders, say, or from the nobility of Lincoln, or from the bravery of Rosa Parks—is that what we come to think of as abiding principles were forged in pragmatism; we mistake their character and meaning if we think otherwise. The enduring traits of a nation or people are apt to be those—parochialism, racism, a confusion of the responsibility of freedom with the emotion of individual impulse—that the better angels of a historical moment or movement overcame. 
 
To read Freeman’s account of the toxic bluster that occupied our congressional leaders in the first half of the nineteenth century, of the “vicious cycle of sectional outrage” that threatened and ultimately destroyed the Union, is to see in deep focus the pull and power of violence in our national character, a pull and power that retain their force today. While we genuflect to high ideals, what’s most entrenched in our historical inheritance always seems to be standing up and shouting over our idealistic heads. It’s why the same themes seem to turn up whatever page of the historical record we turn.
 
“Truth happens to an idea,” wrote William James; a corollary is that it can stop happening. The idea of America is no exception in this regard, which is what is keeping many of us up at night. The legacy of the Founders is not to be discovered in the fixed meaning of texts composed in the crucible of their time, but in the wider context in which they set their unsettled arguments, in the contentious system of checks and balances they created to give their fledging republic a grip on the slippery circumstances it would need to govern. They enshrined contingency in institutions strong and flexible enough to absorb it, and outlast it. 
 
Several weeks ago, I had a conversation with my elder daughter about the uses of history. Digesting the day’s news, we were bemoaning the fact that, on the face of it, history never seems to teach us much; however strong the current of progress, it sooner or later resolves into a whirlpool of injustice, oppression, disorder. But, like strict constructionists looking for certainty in a dynamic field of meaning, we were being shortsighted in our despair, and missing the import, as Joanne Freeman wrote not long ago in The Atlantic, of
 
an idea that historians hold near and dear: contingency—the importance of remembering that people in the past were living in their present, unaware of future outcomes. As I’ve taught time and again in college classrooms, the founding generation didn’t know if it would win the Revolution or if the new nation would survive. . . . People were living in the moment, much like us today.
 
In this light, history is a medium not for finding verities but for learning how others were resourceful and resilient, or confused and craven, in the face of the contingency that was their lot. So, too, is education, broadly speaking, a tool for calibrating contingency, for mapping a way in the world. If we ignore contingency, we ignore liberty, too, for what meaning can liberty have without it?
 
“As a historian,” Freeman writes further in that Atlantic piece, 
 
I know that things don’t always return to “normal” and that recovery is painfully slow and piecemeal. I know that “good” doesn’t always prevail and that past accomplishments can be undone, past injustices reborn. I know that dangers often rise unnoticed and trigger transformative change in a rush. I know the vital importance of the institutional guardrails crumbling around us, and the dangers inherent in unbridled power. And I know—deep in my gut—that I have taken things for granted that I will never take for granted again.
 
Institutions are what cultures evolve to guide their passage up and down the roller coaster of contingent events that we call history, and history itself is one of those institutions. As we do with all institutions, we tend to take it for granted. But how we read history—as doctrine, handed down as law, or as human drama, fraught with uncertainty, necessity, and ingenuity—determines whether its lessons are useful or stultifying. What history teaches is not fixed knowledge but the dexterity of learning.

“History as the antidote to dogma,” reads a shorthand note in Zadie Smith’s new book, Intimations. The small volume closes with a segmented essay called “Intimations: Debts and Lessons,” in which Smith details by name influences that leave her grateful. While the first twenty-five are assigned to specific individuals (my favorite is “25: Carol”, which concludes with these sentences: “The tales of adult women who still know how to play with children—these should be honored. Collected in a history book, like Vasari’s Lives of the Artists. Instead their grandchildren remember.”), the twenty-sixth and final segment is labeled “Contingency.” It begins like this: “That I was born when I was born, where I was born—a case of relative historical luck. That I grew up in a moment of social, religious and national transition. That my school still sang the Anglican hymns, at least for a little while, so that the ancient diction of my country came to me while very young, and fruitfully mixed with the sounds of my heritage. . . .” and goes on for two pages to end like this: “That my children know the truth about me but still tolerate me, so far. That my physical and moral cowardice have never really been tested, until now.”

Remembering a writer, reader, and friend.

In 2007, some time after the end of A Common Reader, my friend Steve Riggio, then CEO of Barnes & Noble, asked me to start a book review on the company’s website. He gave me the best brief an editor ever had: “Make a site that you and I would go to to find something interesting.” And so a new round of deadlines, daily at first, came into play with the Barnes & Noble Review, although there was less pressure for me to write than to assign and edit reviews. Matching writers to books was one of the pleasures of the job, especially when we were able to lure a celebrated author with a well-chosen assignment. That’s how I met Pete Hamill.

Knowing Steve knew Pete, I’d asked for an introduction, and followed up Steve’s email putting the two of us in touch with this one of my own. It’s dated February 11, 2009.

Dear Pete Hamill,

I asked Steve to introduce us because I was several pages into the galley of Colm Tóibín’s forthcoming novel, Brooklyn, when I posed the question I’ve been asking since Steve gave me the chance to develop the B&N Review: “Who would I like to read writing about this book?” Your name came immediately to my mind. The book is set in Brooklyn and Ireland in the 1950s, and seems an interesting departure from Tóibín’s last novel on the life of Henry James, The Master. So if there is any possibility you’d consider reviewing it for us, I’d be thrilled. 

And since I have the opportunity, I’d like to take advantage of it to tell you how much your work has meant to me over the years. Across the room on a shelf I can see a copy of the hardcover of Irrational Ravings I’ve had for nearly four decades (jesus!) now, since I first was on the lookout for writerly models, and next to it the copy of The Gift my mother gave me one Christmas long ago. She chose it because she knew it spoke truly about the perilously indirect conversation between fathers who had graduated from the school of hard knocks and sons who had enrolled themselves, however wishfully, in the school of eloquence. My mother was the reader in the family; I don’t think my father has to this day read a book. He owned a bar for most of my formative years, and your A Drinking Life evoked that world (one I recall with enormous fondness) in a way particularly meaningful to me. There have been a lot of books about drinking, and not drinking, but I’ve never read another so alert to one of the great realities of bars—of American urban life in general, I think. It’s a reality that the drinking often masks and mystifies, but never quite comprehends: the ineluctable, emotionally fraught struggle between the camaraderie and certainties of the neighborhood and the exhilarating, liberating loneliness of a wider world—a bigger fate one can glimpse through reading, but grasp only by leaving. In short, you’ve illuminated the lives of my parents for me better than any other writer I’ve read, and I’ve read a lot. That you’ve therefore had a hand in explaining myself to me goes without saying, but I’ll say it anyway, with admiration and thanks.

Hope you don’t mind the fan letter—and if you have any interest in reviewing the Tóibín book, just let me know and we can discuss the details.

Cheers,

Jim Mustich

His reply, which arrived a mere twenty-four hours later, invoked a newspaperman’s sense of time: “Sorry for the delay,” it began. “I’m holed up in Mexico until next Tuesday, Feb 17, writing hard on a new novel.” He went on to thank me for the enthusiast’s part of my query email: “Somehow, we often lose track of our writings, engrossed in the difficulties of the new. Your letter was a reminder that the books remain alive long after they were written, always an uncertain hope.” 

He went on to comment upon book reviewing in general with characteristic literary learning and pragmatic wisdom: 

Particularly in these hard, shrinking times . . . it would be great to assemble a team of reviewers who don’t think that books are only published to provoke snarky remarks. Or to be subjected to prosecution. It should be possible to be critical and celebratory at the same time. The reviewers I learned from as a writer—VS Pritchett, Edmund Wilson, John Updike, Wilfrid Sheed—managed to do that, even when taking second looks at classics (throw in Italo Calvino here). As fiction writers writing reviews, they were like watchmakers who knew the difficulties of making watches, and would look at the other guy’s watch, and say, you know, if this gear were down here, and that screw up there, the watch would work better. They understood the author’s ambitions and his or her craft, and taught the rest of us about both.

 So yes, I’d be delighted to review Colm Tóibín’s novel called Brooklyn. I don’t know the man, and haven’t read all of his work (I do have the Henry James novel on my Must Read shelf, waiting for the moment). It will depend, of course, only upon deadlines, and space.

Deadlines, and space: a good title for a working writer’s memoir. 

Over the next couple of years, Hamill and I had a friendly correspondence, always circling around writing and books, but never pinned down to the assignment at hand (after doing Brooklyn, I recall, he wrote a magnificent piece on E. L. Doctorow’s Homer and Langley for us). Three or four times, we met for lunch. On the first occasion, Hamill and I were standing outside Union Square Café, then on 16th Street, waiting for Steve to join us, when Peter Workman, who’d signed me up to write 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die a few years earlier, approached the restaurant. When I introduced Peter as my publisher, Hamill inquired what my book was about, and we outlined the project for him. The next afternoon, I received his own list of twenty “books to read before you die.” Here it is:

1. Flann O’Brien: At Swim Two-Birds
2. Carlos Fuentes: The Death of Artemio Cruz
3. Italo Calvino: Invisible Cities
4. James T. Farrell: The Studs Lonigan Trilogy
5. Machado de Assis: The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas
6. Balzac: Lost Illusions (still the best novel about journalists)
7. E. L. Doctorow: Ragtime
8. José Camilo Cela: The Hive (La Colmena)
9. Ray Bradbury: The Martian Chronicles or The Illustrated Man
10. Cesare Pavese: This Business of Living (diaries)
11. Stendhal: On Love
12. Robert Musil: The Man Without Qualities
13. Georges Simenon: The Train or The Premier or The Cat
14. Aristotle: Ethics or Poetics
15. J. P. Donleavy: The Ginger Man 
16. Malcolm Lowry: Under the Volcano
17. Jack Kerouac: On the Road
18. Jean-Paul Sartre: Nausea
19. Cyril Connolly (Palinurus): The Unquiet Grave
20. André Malraux: The Voices of Silence

The list was as delightful and surprising as the man himself. It arrived without commentary on the individual books, except for Balzac’s Lost Illusions, which Pete annotated as “still the best novel about journalists,” an opinion he reiterated some months later, when he recommended it to my daughter, Emma, who was considering a career in journalism. “Let’s have lunch with Pete and see what advice he has,” I’d suggested to her, and Pete gladly agreed to meet us at Basta Pasta on 17th Street, a mutual favorite, and one that Emma had been frequenting since she was about four. 

Read Balzac he said. And Isaac Babel’s Red Cavalry to see how to put a story together. “Always work with an editor,” he said in the less literary, more practical part of the conversation, “and don’t write without getting paid.” Be gracious with your time and talent when you find it, he might have added, although he modeled that so well I guess he didn’t need to say it aloud.

The same afternoon, by coincidence, I had to go uptown to interview Gay Talese about a forthcoming book. “Hamill sends his regards,” I was tickled to be able to say as I introduced myself. “I just came from lunch with him.” Talese’s three-piece reserve was breached. He smiled and said, “I went to his high school graduation a few weeks ago.” 

He then explained the backstory: two days after Hamill’s 75th birthday, and 59 years after he’d dropped out of Regis High School as a sophomore, the Jesuits who run that prestigious institution gave him an honorary diploma. “The Jesuits,” Hamill said in a New York Times report on the festivities, “believe in taking their time on the big decisions.” (In the long lens of eternity that focuses their everyday opportunism, I suppose the Jesuits can afford to ignore shorter deadlines.)

The night I learned of Pete’s passing, I watched a baseball game on television with my father. Observing the surreal pandemic panorama of the thousands of empty stadium seats encircling the ball field, I imagined an unwritten Hamill column about a game unfolding before missing fans, evoking the loss of shared experience that impoverishes our discourse and imperils our civic as well as public health. Like his friend and sometime subject, Frank Sinatra, Hamill had a gift for concentrating expressiveness, for wringing from the several minutes of attention a column might demand what Sinatra could mine from the three or four minutes of a song: emotions that reached beyond the boundaries of the form that carried them, emotions the audience had neither the time nor talent to articulate for themselves, and that experience seldom has the concentration to deliver without the effort of some mediating art. Eloquence can do some things that life itself cannot.

The next day, looking through my correspondence with Pete, I came up an email I had sent him in praise of his review of Willie Mays: The Life, the Legend, by James S. Hirsch, which ran in the New York Times Book Review on February 25, 2010. Here’s the closing paragraph of that piece:

The young should know that there was once a time when Willie Mays lived among the people who came to the ballpark. That on Harlem summer days he would join the kids playing stickball on St. Nicholas Place in Sugar Hill and hold a broom-handle bat in his large hands, wait for the pink rubber spaldeen to be pitched, and routinely hit it four sewers. The book explains what that sentence means. Above all, the story of Willie Mays reminds us of a time when the only performance-enhancing drug was joy.

Once again, to borrow an apt metaphor from James Parker, this gymnast of deadline prose sticks the landing. May he rest in that poise, and in peace.

A writing life under the metaphorical gun.

I was sitting in the backseat of the car taking me from the airport in Lexington, Kentucky to the college at which I was scheduled to speak that afternoon. My laptop—for once true to its name—was resting on my lap as I cut, pasted, and typed my way toward the final draft of the talk I was planning to give in about ninety minutes. 

Actually, final draft is misleading. This would be the first draft, at least the first complete one, since my method of writing longer pieces generally adheres to a pattern: bursts of composition across weeks and months (and sometimes years), recorded in passing on notecards or in transcribed voice memos that are sorted by theme or imagery into computer files, where they sit like coffee grounds, vegetable peelings, and the remains of ripe fruit in a compost pile, waiting for time to do its work. Lately, I’ve come to honor my desultory work methods with more respect than they probably deserve: one way or another, the words do accumulate. I like the notion of “compressed procrastination” that the Silicon Valley apostate Jaron Lanier applies to his own work style. Switching quickly from one activity to another, he has said, “You can get away with feeling like you’re being lazy all the time and yet at the end of the day all the things have gotten done.” If the day is long enough, that proves true; meanwhile, I’ll feel lazy all the time and find a deadline to lean on, or to lean on me. 

I continued typing until we pulled into the driveway of the home of the president of the university, a friend of long standing. Inside the house, after quick greetings, I commandeered a printer to produce my text, and slipped the thirty-odd pages of large-type output into the plastic sleeves of the binder I always use when addressing an audience, to keep my fidgety hands from fumbling with papers. I was ready to go with twenty minutes to spare, ten of which would be needed for the walk to the auditorium, on which my host took pleasure in ribbing me about the obvious care with which I planned my assignments. The students would learn nothing about time management from me.

But the talk was well received, so maybe they learned something else (to judge the likelihood of this for yourself, you can read it here: Alone Together: The Civility of Reading). In any case, despite the fact that its components—some culled from earlier pieces, some newly conceived—felt to me like they had careened together on the last leg of the two-pronged flight from Cleveland by way of Charlotte, as is often the case my intense brooding on the themes I was treating had infused the whole with a consistent point of view that the frenetic final assemblage somehow concentrated. Like some emphatic mark of organizing punctuation, the deadline helped me discover through articulation and arrangement some values that I had been living with for a long time. Which is, for me, the best outcome of putting words on a page: to settle into sharable form ideas and intuitions that have been banging around in my head with inchoate energy, to compose them into meaningful phrases.

If I credit the deadline, rather than the writing and the editing themselves, with the product of the associated labors, it’s because this is what experience has taught me.  The Lexington incident came to mind last week while I was frenetically ordering some thoughts for a large meeting in the moment before the session commenced—annoyed with myself that, once again, I had left work to the last minute when everything that needed to go into it had been at hand for a good while. A thought I have only set down now, with all that precedes it, because this my newsletter’s biweekly deadline has once again raised its head after a pleasant August slumber. 

If that newsletter, In the Company Books, is the latest manifestation of my addiction to the forcing function of imminent publication, the reliance began decades ago. Although, in my teens and twenties, I always regarded myself as a writer-in-progress, I never made much of the progress end of that description until, turning thirty, I co-founded A Common Reader, the book catalogue that would be my livelihood for twenty years. Faced with what soon became an unrelenting schedule—a new catalog in the mail every three weeks—that was driven by the urgent capacities of large presses in Wisconsin that would not abide idleness, I wrote abundantly, prodigiously even, as the assembled catalogues arranged in archive boxes on shelves now in the basement attest. I’d never aspired to be an occasional writer—I’d dreamt of writing volumes of verse or fiction that needed no prompt outside themselves—but, once I fell under the unforgiving spell of print deadlines, every waking hour seemed to provide, or demand, an occasion. 

Every six months of so, tired of being always under the gun due to the procrastinating impulse of the writers (first and foremost, me), our design and production team would mobilize us to consider how we might recalibrate our enterprise to a more rational and manageable timeline. Dutifully mapping tasks to days, we would prove to ourselves that it was demonstrably impossible to do what we were already doing, and so reverted to form. When A Common Readermet its demise in 2006, I had already subsumed its perpetual cycle of deadlines into what would come to seem an eternal one, as I turned my writing attention to 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die, originally promised for delivery in 2008 and finally finding its way between covers ten years later. Not a weekend went by in all that time that I wasn’t, in some recess of my spirit, entangled in conversation with the increasingly quixotic task of completing that book. Obviously, shorter and firmer deadlines work better; still, without at least the idea of the book’s deadline to weigh down my distraction and anchor it to prose on a page, however belatedly, the more than half-million words it contains would never have been written.

In May 2019, James Parker published “The Lost Art of Deadline Writing” in The Atlantic. In this review of a Library of America volume, The Great American Sports Page: A Century of Classic Columns from Ring Lardner to Sally Jenkins, edited by John Schulian, Parker—for my money one of the best writers in America—culminates a string of arresting quotations from sportswriters past with a paragraph that evokes with precision and élan the intoxications of composing under pressure:

And they were on deadline! We’re all on deadline, of course, at all times and in all places.The last judgment, as Kafka pointed out, “is a summary court in perpetual session.” But a print deadline—the galloping clock, the smell of the editor—is a particular concentration of mortal tension. The brain on deadline does whatever it can: It improvises, it compresses, it contrives, it uses the language and the ideas that are at hand. Inspiration comes or it doesn’t. Here the writer is an athlete—performing under pressure and, if he or she is good, delivering on demand.

Which goes some way toward explaining why, after five decades of deadline thralldom, I am sitting at my desk in pre-dawn light writing this brief essay for my newsletter, to meet a mail date no one cares about but me, in hope of finding, somewhere along the way, a phrase that will bring a bounce to my spirit’s gait, just the way the momentum of movement can surprise a body into gracefulness, transforming training and muscle and effort into fluency.

An address at Transylvania University, 10.18.18

Good afternoon. I’d like to thank President Carey and the university for inviting me to speak to you today as part of the Creative Intelligence program. I appreciate the warm welcome, and I would especially like to thank each of you for coming to listen.

This afternoon I’ll be speaking about who I am, and tell you a bit about the book I’ve written. And then I’ll use aspects of that book’s content and themes to share some thoughts that I hope you’ll find relevant to Transylvania’s campus theme of civility.

I’ve been an avid reader for six decades now, and a bookseller, too, for four of those. My book, 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die, is a testament to those pursuits. In writing it, I wanted to make a record of what I’ve loved as a reader and what I’ve learned as a bookseller. Like all dedicated booksellers, I view the job as something of a vocation, In the words of Roger Mifflin, the bookselling protagonist of Christopher Morley’s Parnassus on Wheels and The Haunted Bookshop, two marvelous novels from the early 20^th century that have made their way into my 1,000, dedicated booksellers seek “to spread good books about, to sow them on fertile minds, to propagate understanding and a carefulness of life and beauty.”

“A carefulness of life and beauty” is one way to view civility. But more on that in a moment.

I’ve spent fourteen years writing 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die, and in some of those years I wasn’t entirely convinced I was going to finish it the before the terminal event invoked in its title came to claim me. But here I am, book in hand. And now that I’ve finished it I expect to spend the next fourteen years traveling around to bookstores, libraries, and venues like this hearing from readers like you what I’ve got wrong. I hope we’ll get to some of that at the end of my talk when we open the floor for questions and conversation.

And it’s something I very much welcome, and am quite used to by now. For once people know you’re writing a book called 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die, you can never enjoy a dinner party in quite the way you did before.

No matter how many books you’ve managed to consider, and no matter how many pages you’ve written, every conversation with a fellow reader is almost sure to provide new titles to seek out, or, more worryingly, to expose an egregious omission or a gap in your knowledge—to say nothing of revealing the privileges and prejudices, however unwitting, underlying your points of reference.

While I hope my recommendations are useful to people, and fun for them to explore, I know all readers will use their own agency in alighting upon their next book. In fact, one of the first things you see when you open mine is an epigraph from Virginia Woolf, drawn from her essay, “How Should One Read a Book?”

“The only advice,” Woolf writes, “… that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions. If this is agreed between us, then I feel at liberty to put forward a few ideas and suggestions because you will not allow them to fetter that independence which is the most important quality that a reader can possess.” 

I’ll venture to say that “independence” and “agency” also belong to the word cloud that surrounds the idea of civility.

Before I talk more about that, let me give you a brief description of what my book is: 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die is 1000 brief, informative, and—I hope—entertaining essays on 1000 books which range in time from the Epic of Gilgamesh, encoded on tablets in Babylon some 4000 years ago, to Ellen Ullman’s Life in Code: A Personal History of Technology, which was published in 2017.

The books range in provenance from the classical to the commercial, in mood from the wisdom of Plato to the wit of Dorothy Parker, in style from stateliness of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice to the millennial hipness of Zadie Smith’s White Teeth. My selections are about 50% fiction and 50% nonfiction, the former encompassing mysteries and entertainments as well as literary fiction, the latter consisting of a broad range of subjects from biography and memoir to travel and food and science, philosophy and religion and poetry. And since my title invokes a lifetime’s reading, there are plenty of books from children and adolescents. In fact, one might follow a reader’s life in my pages from Goodnight, Moon and Where the Wild Things all the way to Simone de Beauvor’s The Coming of Age and Joan Didion memoir of mourning, The Year of Magical Thinking.

The book is not prescriptive, but inviting: I hope readers will open it anywhere and, as the poet and critic Randall Jarrell once exhorted us, “Read at whim! Read at whim!” I like to think of it as a big menu, because I believe readers read the way they eat—hot dogs one day and haute cuisine the next—and I wanted it to speak to every kind of reading appetite.

A thousand books felt for years like far too many to get my head around, but now it seems too few by several multiples. So let me say what already should be obvious: 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die is neither comprehensive nor authoritative, even if a good number of the titles assembled in it would be on most lists of essential reading. It is meant to be an invitation to a conversation—even a merry argument—about the books and authors that are missing as well as the books and authors included, because the question of what to read next is the best prelude to even more important ones, like who to be, and how to live.

And that’s where I think my work begins to intersect with the theme of civility.

For running through the book, like a steady current connecting all the discrete essays, is a lifelong rumination on why we read, and how the traditions, technologies, and culture of the book have enriched our individual and collective lives, especially compared to the world of screens and algorithms in which we are, like it or not, increasingly at home. How does all this—and especially the products of the age of the book, which supply the matter of mine—resonate with the theme of civility?

Let’s leave my book and go to the dictionary.

In Merriam Webster, we find 3 meanings for “civility”: the first, labeled “archaic,” is: “training in the humanities.”

The second is “Civilized conduct, especially: courtesy, politeness.”

 And the third is “Formal politeness or courtesy in behavior or speech.”

You can trace the same evolution, or devolution, through historical examples in the Oxford English Dictionary, following the meaning of the word as it narrows from education to etiquette; in this it curiously mirrors the degradation in spiritual fitness described in the Tao Te Ching, or Way of Life, composed in China somewhere around the mid third century before the common era. In Witter Bynner’s translation of this influential and resilient work of spiritual guidance, the 38^th section, which is actually the first section in the oldest manuscripts, reads:

Losing the way of life, men rely first on their fitness;
Losing fitness, they turn to kindness;
Losing kindness, they turn to justness;
Losing justness, they turn to convention.

In those lines, the Tao presents a perfect précis of the stages of human development: from an infant’s equanimity through the development of character, the recognition of ethics, the tyranny of duty, and the consensus of convention. It is not a progress of growth as much as one of accommodation and diminishment in response to the complications and demands of experience. As in the Tao, so with civility: although they surely have their uses, our goal should be not be the accommodating achievements of duty and politeness, convention and etiquette, but the deeper ones that define a truer way: the soul of civility, and not its costume.

That civility, to say nothing of the soul, is archaic in or day and age, as the lexicographers of Merriam-Webster suggest, is to put it in the same bin with the humanities themselves, construed as outdated by many because they require an apprehension—“an understanding and carefulness of life and beauty”—that has an emergent and informing substance rather than an immediate return. They may be seen as neither efficient nor marketable, but they are sustaining and meaningful nonetheless.

The Tao Te Ching is among my 1,000 books, as is a work called The Geography of the Imagination, by a notable citizen of Lexington, Guy Davenport, who died in 2005. A longtime presence at this city’s University of Kentucky campus, Davenport was one of the great teachers of our time, a one-man renaissance who enriched the minds of both his students and his readers. As Transylvania professor Richard Taylor knows, because he quotes the sentence in the introduction to his own book Elkhorn, Davenport once wrote: “Art is always the replacing of indifference by attention.” And I think we might say something similar of civility: it is a function of the quality of our attention rather than the formalities of our behavior.

Etiquette, after all, is in one way the codifying of indifference; civility, in its venerable sense, a steeping in the humanities, is the shaping of our presence in the world: a way of life. The quality of our attention, of course, is shaped by what we pay attention to. In a book called The Attention Merchants, published a couple of years ago, Tim Wu writes: “As William James observed, we must reflect that, when we reach the end of our days, our life experience will equal what we have paid attention to, whether by choice or default. We are at risk, without quite fully realizing it, of living lives that are less our own than we imagine.”

And William James himself, another author represented among my 1000 Books, wrote this: “Millions of items of the outward order are present to my senses which never properly enter into my experience. Why? Because they have no interest for me. My experience is what I agree to attend to. Only those items which I notice shape my mind—without selective interest, experience is an utter chaos. Interest alone gives accent and emphasis, light and shade, background and foreground intelligible perspective, in a word. It varies in every creature, but without it the consciousness of every creature would be a gray chaotic indiscriminateness, impossible for us even to conceive.”

“Only those items which I notice shape my mind.” Which means that what we choose to notice may be the most important continuous decision-making we do, whether we are aware of the choices or not. In important ways, a training in the humanities relies on the cultivation of our own interests, and thus civility, in that old sense of the word, is the first bulwark against indiscriminateness.

Yet we live in age of news feeds, of often benign but all-too-often perniciously targeted information in which indiscriminateness is disguised as its opposite, a kind of collectively individualized experience in which we are habituated not to noticing but to consuming. It is not our attention that is served, but rather, our distraction.

There is a new book of essays on this theme—called, appropriately enough, Attention—by the novelist Joshua Cohen. In a review of it published in the Wall Street Journal about six weeks ago, Zachary Fine spoke about the pitfalls of our newsfeed world as he parsed Joshua Cohen’s meaning:

“What does it mean, Mr. Cohen wonders, to live online, in a ‘land’ without a common culture—that’s inimical to a common culture—where facticity is under siege, where identities are worn and shorn and shed like clothing. Images of mass death, reports on the salubrity of butter, sound bites of the swallow’s birdsong: ‘We click away,’ [Cohen writes], ‘but then we return, but then we click away again.’ Distractions, expertly engineered, squeeze our attentions for profit all day, and then we return home tired, fumble through the dark and hunger for our screens again—another distraction in this unending, grim regress.

“To live in America today,” Mr. Cohen writes, “is to sit slackjawed at a helpless recline, stuck between the external forces that seek to disempower and control us, and our own internal drives to preserve, protect, and defend our hearts and minds.”

Space for our hearts and minds—space for both to breathe, and stretch, and grow—is something reading creates. That sense of agency that reading gives us, that we also get from browsing in a bookstore and coming upon something we didn’t know we wanted but that speaks to us with urgency and charm, is something that I’ve sought to get between the covers of my book for the pleasure of readers first, but also for a larger purpose: We live in an age of algorithms, in which all of human experience is subject to rules of engineering efficiency. That’s marvelous, and even liberating, in many ways.

But the most important experiences in life are not efficient. Infancy isn’t efficient, nor is growing up. Education is not efficient, and is less and less education in its true sense the more it pretends to be efficient. Raising children isn’t efficient. Taking care of aging parents isn’t efficient. Falling in love isn’t efficient, and falling out of love is even less so. In fact, thinking is seldom efficient, nor are the revelations we come to about ourselves and the world by living, pondering, and worrying until we learn to be comfortable in our own skin.

Reading of any kind helps us with the living, pondering, and worrying that shapes us, not so much by delivering instructions as by allowing us the space to discover inspirations and develop our intuitions—space in which we can learn to talk to ourselves more thoughtfully than the press of events usually allows. “Becoming is a secret process,” Heraclitus wrote more than 2500 years ago, as noted by Guy Davenport in his book of translations of that ancient philosopher, as Professor Taylor again noted in his book, Elkhorn. It is, in fact, the age of the book which created that space in which our hearts and minds take shape. It was reading that created what we think of now as the inner life, the secret process of becoming ourselves.

Let me explain.

We seldom recognize liberty of attention as a fundamental human achievement—as something that wasn’t always available to be taken for granted. Nor do we appreciate what a remarkable cultural artifact the inner life is; that it is an artifact can be discovered be delving into the history of reading, especially during the first centuries after the first millennium of the common era. Let’s take a dive.

At the Marseilles monastery established by John Cassian in the early fifth century, the founder’s works, based on scripture and the experiences of the Desert Fathers, were read aloud constantly at supper. Such tuning of the ear to the word of God and its echoes was called lectio divina (divine reading); it provided a storehouse of matter for meditation. Four centuries later, as we read in Michel Rouche’s essay in “The Early Middle Ages in the West” in A History of Private Life, the Benedictine rule—adopted by all monasteries throughout the Carolingian Empire in 817—“required each monk to chant or recite all the psalms every week.” Lectio, divine as it was, was still vocal and aural; the inwardness it fostered resounded with oracular echoes.

Yet, Rouche informs us, Saint Benedict himself was instrumental in encouraging private reading, setting aside for it in the monkish regimen “two hours every morning from Easter to the first of November, and three hours in winter.” Still, “Reading was almost always out loud, since in those days the texts had no punctuation and words were not separated.” The solitude of silent reading had yet to be discovered.

Three centuries on, Hugh of St. Victor’s Didascalicon, an early encyclopedia and guide to the art of reading, anticipated the leap from monastic texts (designed for oral, collective recitation) to scholastic works (texts organized for soundless, contemplative, individual study). The springboard for the shift, Ivan Illich asserts in In the Vineyard of the Text, his fascinating study of Hugh’s treatise (and another of the books among my 1000), was a series of technical innovations—improved punctuation, indentation, titles and headings, chapters, indexes—that enabled and encouraged a new treatment of words on a page. As a result, authors were transformed from tellers of tales to creators of texts, auditors were transmuted into silent readers, and thought filled the voice’s vacuum. Apprehension was exchanged for comprehension, inquiry for oracle. All that would grow from the bookish life followed.

“That which we mean today, when, in ordinary conversation, we speak of the ‘self’ or the ‘individual’,” Illich writes, “is one of the great discoveries of the twelfth century. Neither in the Greek nor in the Roman conceptual constellation was there a place into which it could be fitted.” This discovery, too, is at the foundation of the age of the book, for not only does reading, as Illich notes, presuppose private space and the recognition of the right to periods of silence, but the medium of the book creates and shapes a mental space that did not exist in quite the same way before. Within this space is a field for ordering reality according to the reader’s lights and intuitions, a personal reality distinct from, albeit in conversation with, the world outside.

This inward movement of attention is one of the great migrations in the history of the West, through gateways of pages, opening into chambers of reflection, learning, and wonder that might prove independent of the volumes’ contents. Inwardness revealed its own rich territory, of pondering that stretched beyond prayer, and solitude unfolded into the rich tradition we’ve come to know as humanism. The humanities were cultivated in this space that reading created, and civility followed.

The new kind of reading that was fostered by the technical improvements Illich identifies also abetted, eventually, the composition of literary works which in turn conjured new resources—tools for the mining of the imaginative space reading had created. The most magical period of that conjuring occurred in a few decades falling on both sides of the year 1600, when three towering presences in my book—the French essayist, Montaigne, the English playwright Shakespeare, and the Spanish novelist Cervantes shaped in language the modern mind and the culture it would inhabit. That these three were alive and writing at the same time is one of the wonders of history, and coincidence of an especially telling sort. With their works, they expanded literary language into a dimension that would become as essential to our lives as time and space, a dimension in which we could search for meaning, and learn to make it. Through essay, dramatic verse, and novel, this trio engendered and gave shape to what we have come to take for granted as the landscape of contemplation and action, informing not only our conception of human nature, but of human potential—the maturation and significance of our lives—as well.

Indeed, the literary revolution Montaigne, Shakespeare, and Cervantes fomented, one might argue, was every bit as influential in nourishing the historical courses of Enlightenment and democracy as the scientific revolution to which credit generally devolves, and just as dependent upon the development and promulgation of method. The invention of large parts of that literary method, as useful an application of intelligence as its scientific counterpart (and maybe even more so), can be traced back to these three seminal writers. In different ways, each brought to a head the force of vernacular language set free by the decline and fall of the Latin empire, inventing a form that force would evolve on the pages of subsequent generations of writers. With all three, writing was an inquiry rather than a memorial, and even today their works retain a kind of provisionality that interacts with the personal perspective readers bring to it at any given point in time; they are more like organisms made of words than immutable texts—or, dare one say it, like software intuitively responsive to user interaction (reading Montaigne’s On Experience at nineteen is substantively different than reading it at fifty-nine, and you can do your own math on King Lear; Don Quixote’s delusions, it goes without saying, become more sympathetically poignant the older we get). It’s hard to imagine artificial intelligence more revelatory than that embodied in the words of these master artificers. 

In real ways Montaigne can be said to have invented the essay, at least as a private chamber on the page which could be decorated with mental furniture—qualms, hesitations, ideas, the flotsam and jetsam of reading—that could then be rearranged to make a habitable space for self and soul. Shakespeare did something similar on the public venue of the stage, turning it into a laboratory of human interaction in which the medium of discovery was a probing, playful language that invoked the contents of hearts and minds and made them visible to audiences (if not always to the characters); the core of his art is the soliloquy, which he fabricated in the same way as Montaigne conjured the essay, creating a space in which a mind could unpack itself while an audience followed the unfolding (that space would prove cavernous and consequently resonant: one can wander within the vaults of Shakespeare’s soliloquies for years, uncovering wonders like an archaeologist of worlds past, present, and to come). 

While the singularities of Montaigne and Shakespeare are easy to see and wear a grandeur that is undeniable, Cervantes’s achievement is disguised not only by its comic dress, but by the amorphous being and volubility of the narrative form he created for it: the modern novel, in which a story interrogates itself even as it puts its characters through their paces. Cervantes made fiction itself a tool of inquiry, letting stories intersect, interrupt, and reimagine each other in the lives of his characters (much as they do, really, in the course of our lives). He uncovered a new world for literary endeavor as surely as the seagoing stalwarts of his time explored new continents. If Shakespeare’s legacy is represented by the soliloquy, Cervantes might be seen to have bestowed upon us, through his own work and that of every novelist who became his heir, the colloquy between the inside of our heads and the outside world that the novel exemplifies, and that Don Quixote taught fiction to empower.

In the story of Quixote, a misguided hero besotted by popular romances of chivalry and steadied only by the hands of a capable and long-suffering companion, Sancho Panza, Cervantes manages to depict—in comedy high and low and in episodes alternately satiric, hilarious, and moving—the battle between idealism and realism that is the unresolved, and perhaps unresolvable, conflict of human existence. He also created two of the most memorable characters in all literature. Four centuries after its composition, Don Quixote still has the power to educate and delight us, and those who’ve yet to read it should be prepared to be transported, astonished, amused, and vastly entertained by Quixote’s follies, Sancho’s instinctive resourcefulness, and—most of all—Cervantes’s ingenuity.

William Egginton’s recent life of the author justly calls him “The Man Who Invented Fiction,” and the history of the novel Cervantes’s invention set in motion is one in which imaginative empathy would nobly struggle to understand human nature and the quagmires it finds itself in. Understanding that we parse life and create meaning in it through stories, Cervantes intuited that truth, and most ideals, were malleable, informed by perspective, context, and subjectivity, and that therefore fiction might be in fact an effective form of pragmatism in the face of life’s messiness. If our apprehension of the world around us is a constructed one, always fictive and emergent, rather than imposed and fixed, our shared perplexity is cause for compassion and generosity rather than ridicule and meanness; that’s the lesson Don Quixote teaches us with joy and charity, delivering light and laughter on nearly every page.

Which renders Cervantes’s book never outdated, but particularly timely today, when the reduction of human singularity to economic and biological processes and data-driven convictions threatens the better angels of our nature once again with devilish imprisonments. Alert not only to its own artifice but to its existence in the world as a book, Don Quixote is a story about stories and how they shape our lives—a brilliant feat of narrative magic that illustrates storytelling’s unscientific but unshakable presence at the root of our humanity. On the one hand an elegy for idealism, it is also a celebration of the power of our fictive apprehensions of the world, and the sympathies they foster, to make unidealized life more livable.

 “World is crazier and more of it than we think, / Incorrigibly plural,” wrote the poet Louis MacNeice, and our interaction with that craziness and plurality—the colloquy between the inside of our heads and the outside world—begins, like Quixote’s, in the stories we tell ourselves and in the language we have available to tell them.

If civility requires a common language shared with others, it nonetheless starts in how we talk to ourselves, in that ongoing conversation we have within our heads, and which reading is the best way of nourishing. For books offer us not just texts, but contexts. And as the technological timeline moves more and more rapidly from the age of the book to the age of the screen, the skill of grasping and holding contexts is ever more important. Critical questions are left unexplored, or their consequences are ill-considered, if data alone defines our choices or, worse yet, determines our destiny.

Search, for instance, is a word, and a pursuit, that has lost in luster what it has gained in power in our digital age. Where it once meant adventure, or becoming, or a quest for meaning, it has been reduced to the return of snippets of information, ecommerce promotions, targeted ads, and the false precisions of data’s limited, if powerful, parsing of experience. As useful as it is, we don’t want to run our lives by GPS, where we always know what the next step is, but don’t have a wider sense of where we are and where we might be going. It saves us from the fear of getting lost by sacrificing our freedom to learn how to find our way.

Any structuring of experience that is slave to an algorithm, that keeps us from finding paths that might illuminate our past and surprise our future, does so by making the story of our present more convenient and efficient. But it’s unlikely to be the story that, on reflection, we want our lives to tell. In a news feed, what happens next soon becomes irrelevant, because it will disappear as soon as something else is served in its place. Nothing matters much.

Stories that matter are hard to tell, but the only ones worth living. To tell them well, to live them well, we need the language in our heads to be rich enough to support all the joys and disappointments, the sorrows and the blessings, that life sends our way.

The more nuanced and flexible that language, the firmer its grasp on our experience, and the better we’ll be able to share our stories, and to understand those told us in return. Thus giving the archaic meaning of civility—a training in the humanities—a fresher one, one that is not merely formal but substantive, compassionate, and maybe even magnanimous. There is no public civility without a private one beneath it.

In “Aspohdel, That Greeny Flower,” William Carlos Williams said all of this much more eloquently, and succinctly: “It is difficult / to get the news from poems / yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there.” And what is it that is found there? Not certainties, but conversing truths: the still small voice of a writer talking to a reader, and a reader talking to herself.

Do you know a book by Claudia Rankine called Citizen? It was published in 2014 and won the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry (in a sign of the book’s multivalent singularity, it was also a finalist in the Criticism category). Rankine’s remarkable book is about being a citizen in an uncivil union in which one’s figure in the world is alternatively ominous and invisible. It also has the distinction—and this is why it is among my 1000—of creating a private voice—an interior one—to amplify and make resonant the most difficult public themes.

“Yes, and this is how you are a citizen,” we read as we approach the end of this book about race, identity, language, and memory: “Come on. Let it go. Move on.” The phrases echo others sounded on earlier pages in their urging that the consciousness at work—the “you” being addressed—evade engagement with racial hostility, disregard the insults of insensitive slights, swallow pride in the face of prejudice ignorant or intentional: “Then the voice in your head silently tells you to take your foot off your throat because just getting along shouldn’t be an ambition.”

While, given such deadly serious subject matter, the book’s subtitle—“An American Lyric”—might seem ironic, it holds the key to Rankine’s most telling achievement, for the composed space of reflection and repose that is the domain of lyric poetry provides a magnifying frame for everything Citizen encompasses. It is clearly drawn in the book’s initial paragraph: “When you are alone and too tired even to turn on any of your devices, you let yourself linger in a past stacked among your pillows…. [The moon’s] dark light dims in degrees depending on the density of clouds and you fall back into that which gets reconstructed as metaphor.” It is exactly because Rankine is a lyric poet of such extraordinary gifts that she cannot comply with the demands her citizenship demands: “Come on. Let it go. Move on.” In the pages of Citizen, she holds fast to what’s she seen, brings close what others have felt and suffered, breathes language into the deadened air of grief, forcing herself—and her readers—to scrutinize the pain that racism provokes, and to stand still and ponder its cumulative injury and sorrow.

Reading Citizen, or Don Quixote, or the soliloquies of Shakespeare, or the essays of Montaigne or Guy Davenport, nourishes our inner life, alerting us, through the words of others, to the vocabulary and grammar we need to make sense of our own lives.

This faith in reading’s power, and the learning and imagination it nourishes, is something I’ve been lucky enough to take for granted as both fact and freedom; it’s something I fear may be forgotten in the great amnesia of our in-the-moment newsfeeds and algorithmically defined identities, which hide from our view the complexity of feelings and ideas that books demand we quietly, and determinedly, engage.

To get lost in a story, or even a study, is inherently to acknowledge the voice of another, to broaden one’s perspective beyond the confines of one’s own understanding. It makes us better speakers, and better listeners. A good book is the opposite of a selfie; the right book at the right time can expand our lives in the way love does, making us more thoughtful, more generous, more brave, more alert to the world’s wonders and more pained by its inequities, better speakers and better listeners, more wise, more kind.

A better education in civility is hard to imagine.

Thank you for listening.

Reading and remembering in a Soviet prison camp.

The most interesting book I’ve read recently is only about sixty pages long, even though it is about a book fifty times longer than that. It is, in fact, not about reading that longer book, but about remembering it; which couldn’t be more appropriate, given that the work being remembered is Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. 

Lost Time: Lectures on Proust in a Soviet Prison Camp, which collects the insights and musings on the French author that one prisoner of war, the Polish painter Jósef Czapski, shared with his fellow inmates to insinuate a liberty of mind into their captive present, is a remarkable meditation on memory and literature and, through these themes, the making of meaning.

In a note later added to the original transcription of his prison camp talks, Czapski writes: 

I am quoting Goethe here from memory, perhaps distorting his text. Rozanov [a pre-revolutionary Russian writer and thinker], attacked by critics for imprecise or distorted citations, quipped: “There’s nothing easier than to quote a text precisely, you just have to check the books. It’s far more difficult to assimilate a quotation to the point where it becomes yours and becomes part of you.” If I misquote it’s precisely because of the impossibility of checking in books. Also, I possess neither Rozanov’s glibness nor his entitlement as a writer of genius.

But Rozanov, I think, was onto something, and, as Czapski may have been artfully implying with his note, these lectures on Proust go a long way to validating the value of learning possessed by absorption rather than analysis, apprehension rather than academic precision. The selves we assemble from memory are like a book of quotations, cribbed from experience, education, emotional entanglements, and spiced with the rare and often lonely original thought; in any act of reflection or expression, we put these together—now ordered this way, now that, then scrambled and realigned to meet the pressures of the moment—to keep our identity malleable enough to navigate our days and resourceful enough to make it through our nights. 

In his own monograph on Proust (as I learned from Czapski, whose lectures have been translated by Eric Karpeles), Samuel Beckett claimed the author of In Search of Lost Time had a bad memory: “the man with a good memory does not remember anything because he does not forget anything.” Proust’s gift was for remembering, for discovering the past as it unfolded in a space that existed only as he created it from the prompts of the present. If, in its uniformity, as Beckett says, a good memory is “an instrument of reference instead of an instrument of discovery,” the deficiencies of Proust’s, through the demands of his vocation, made a “bad memory” a tool of exploration and even revelation. Like memories, as Proust knew better than anyone, every sentence finds its meaning on the way to it, like a traveler with all senses alert leaving a familiar path without ever quite losing sight of it, finding a perspective on past and future in nearly every footfall of the here and now.

In the footsteps of Patrick Leigh Fermor.

For someone who has lived so long on the page, traveling in books, as opposed to real life, is not as impoverished an experience as it might seem on the face of it. Not when there is writing like this to savor:

The sun had gone down but the trees and the first houses of Kampos were still glowing with the sunlight they had been storing up since dawn. It seemed to be shining from inside them with the private, interior radiance of summer in Greece that lasts for about an hour after sundown so that the white walls and the tree trunks and the stones fade into the darkness at last like slowly expiring lamps.

That’s Patrick Leigh Fermor, early in his 1958 book, Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese, describing the waning day in a Greek village with an expressiveness artful enough to illuminate housebound evenings here in Connecticut with warm light from half a world away. The way Fermor builds landscapes on the page, and sends sentences winding through them, is often breathtaking (and sometimes, given his expansive vocabulary and penchant for arcane historical anecdote, arduous). No other writer I know creates so palpable a reality with words, one that seems constructed from stones, from natural formations, from plants and clouds and water. Fermor can summon with sentences a path a reader can follow, treading with care and then abandon as unsure steps gain traction and then are swept along at speed by the rush of sense and sensation the prose conveys. The hunks and colors of the world are caught by words that seem as much a material part of the author’s perception as the rocks and ravines and vistas they describe. 

Here he is, again in Mani, describing the Grecian air:

The air in Greece is not merely a negative void between solids; the sea itself, the houses and rocks and trees, on which it presses like a jelly mould, are embedded in it; it is alive and positive and volatile and one is as aware of its contact as if it could have pierced hearts scrawled on it with diamond rings or be grasped in handfuls, tapped for electricity, bottled, used for blasting, set fire to, sliced into sparkling cubes and rhomboids with a pair of shears, be timed with a stop watch, strung with pearls, plucked like a lute string or tolled like a bell, swum in, be set with rungs and climbed like a rope ladder or have saints assumed through it in flaming chariots; as though it could be harangued into faction, or eavesdropped, pounded down with pestle and mortar for cocaine, drunk from a ballet shoe, or spun, woven and worn on solemn feasts; or cut into discs for lenses, minted for currency or blown, with infinite care, into globes.

Actualities that have melted in the heat of time are reconstituted and fixed to his pages by the weight of his words, which are wielded with an exuberance that makes reading a mere couple of pages wholly satisfying—so much so that one can linger on them from one evening to the next, reading them again, and again, the way one might return to the same restaurant in a foreign city night after night, forsaking scores of others, because the flavors and ambience you found there nourished some need you never quite knew you had, and indulging it is sheer delight.

Mani was one of his Fermor’s earlier books. It was followed, in 1966, by Roumeli, a companion volume tracking travels in northern Greece. It wasn’t until 1977, when the author was 62, that his masterpiece began to see the light of day, in the first volume of a prospective trilogy about a journey he took on foot “from the hook of Holland to Constantinople.” That initial installment, A Time of Gifts, was followed nine years later by a second, Between the Woods and the Water (the third segment of the trilogy waspublished posthumously as The Broken Road in 2013, two years after the author’s death; incomplete and not fully polished by Fermor, it is nonetheless a substantial and welcome work). What’s remarkable about these opulent narratives is that the travels they recount with such attention and eloquence were reconstructed from old notebooks and memory more than forty years after the fact, detailing a trek that began in December 1933, when the young Fermor set out from London with a borrowed knapsack and a small weekly allowance (a single British pound). After arriving by boat in Holland, the eighteen-year-old walked from Amsterdam all the way across Central Europe to Constantinople in Turkey. It took him a year and a half, during which he assumed different perspectives: high-spirited young adventurer with a talent for making friends; knowledgeable and insatiably curious student of history and culture; sharply observant eyewitness of the moods and circumstances that were leading Europe inexorably toward World War II.

Together, the two volumes of the trilogy that appeared during Fermor’s lifetime rank among the best autobiographical travelogues in English. The older Fermor’s descriptions of his younger self’s exploits on barges and in beer halls, of his nights passed in barns and in castles, of his encounters with laborers, scholars, and aristocrats—all are suffused with both the innocence of youthful adventure and the sophistication of age’s experience, erudition, and reflection. It is an uncommon combination, layered with strata of time—experiential, remembered, historical—that entwine a rich and cultured consciousness through every paragraph. The very story of the writing of these books, across a stretch of time nearly as long as that which separated the completion of A Time of Gifts from the first steps of Fermor’s walk, speaks to the magic of the writer’s reconstitution of his youth, his sorcerer’s ability to re-member the past in prose that has an almost physical dexterity, casting spells in which words are sense instruments animating sentiments with all they capture. Memory becomes an act of making, rather than a mere cataloguing of what’s past and gone.

Here he is on page one of A Time of Gifts, setting out from London on what would be a pilgrim’s progress across a continent, and many decades:

“A splendid afternoon to set out!” said one of the friends who was seeing me off, peering at the rain and rolling up the window.

    The other two agreed. Sheltering under the Curzon Street arch of Shepherd Market, we had found a taxi at last. In Half Moon Street, all collars were up. A thousand glistening umbrellas were tilted over a thousand bowler hats in Piccadilly; the Jermyn Street shops, distorted by streaming water, had become a submarine arcade; and the clubmen of Pall Mall, with china tea and anchovy toast in mind, were scuttling for sanctuary up the steps of their clubs. Blown askew, the Trafalgar Square fountains twirled like mops, and our taxi, delayed by a horde of Charing Cross commuters reeling and stampeding under a cloudburst, crept into The Strand. The vehicle threaded its way through a flux of traffic. We splashed up Ludgate Hill and the dome of St Paul’s sank deeper in its pillared shoulders. The tyres slewed away from the drowning cathedral and a minute later the silhouette of The Monument, descried through veils of rain, seemed so convincingly liquefied out of the perpendicular that the tilting thoroughfare might have been forty fathoms down. The driver, as he swerved wetly into Upper Thames Street, leaned back and said: “Nice weather for young ducks.”

Tonight, I’ll map in the large pages of an atlas Fermor’s peregrination from Picadilly to Prague and beyond, conjuring travels of our own that I can only hope are yet to come.

A sojourn in Gascony, a suspension of Spain.

We’d planned a trip for this September. It was to be an encore of sorts of our trip to Gascony in May 2018, when we spent a week under the influence of Kate Hill, an American expatriate and cultural and culinary educator who has lived in France for the past three decades. Her home, a small farmhouse called Camont, is bordered on one side by a canal on which is parked the Dutch barge, the Julia Hoyt, on which she, in an earlier period of her life, charted a flavorful course throughout Europe. Camont houses a rustic kitchen of wood and stone and fire, as well as a bigger, brighter, stainless teaching space equipped with professional appliances in which Kate teaches the techniques, from the rudimentary to the recondite, of butchery, charcuterie, and other savory arts.

We’d found our way to Kate that first time after we’d finished a hard year’s labor completing 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die, including several months’ immersion in the final editing and massive task of proofing. With the book finally off to the printer, we shelved our initial plan to revisit Rome—since enjoying the hum and hurry of the Eternal City, for all the inspiration it engenders, requires an investment of energy morning, noon, and night that I was afraid our depleted reserves would be unable to supply—and searched for a more leisurely, less self-directed alternative. Margot found it via a profile of Kate in one cooking magazine or another, and we signed on for a week under her care and tutelage, billed as “Insider’s Gascony.”

Turned out that it was just us and one fellow insider, a charming Canadian journalist who was combining work with play, but the intimacy of our group made our daily round of exploration, shopping, cooking, eating, and imbibing just the restorative routine we needed. Our accommodations were in a 17th-century chateau just down the road from Camont, in the town of Espiens. Flanked by vineyards front and back, the Château de Mazelières, in the midst of what appeared to be an unhurried renovation (its grand, elegantly empty spaces making it a nicely rentable venue for weddings and the like), exuded a confidential character that charmed me. The stone rooms were huge, as were the doorways that ushered one into them, which reached to nearly the full height of what must have been eighteen-foot ceilings. Walking from the kitchen and dining room through a central reception area and a few other large and sparely furnished chambers to our bedroom, opening and slowly closing the heavy doors behind us as we crossed each threshold, one moved through an etiquette of architected quiet that filled one with a happy sense of composure. The bedroom was enormous, its dimensions spanning, say, twenty feet in one direction and twenty-five in the other, with high, paneled windows of antique glass framing vines and sky and, after dark, the stars. It was easy to imagine Montaigne standing at them ruminating upon an essay, or Robin Hood bursting through the door behind him, sword drawn, in pursuit of a villain; which is to say, my fantasy life felt at home.

Every morning, Kate and her vivacious sidekick and business partner, Maureen, would pick us up at the chateau and ferry us on adventures to market towns, wineries, farms, and local landmarks. It was a kind of cultivated foraging, enlivened by conversation with the artisans—fromagers, butchers, bakers, vignerons, growers of fruits and vegetables—whose comestibles we collected. To stand before a cheesemonger’s display on a cobblestone street in one of these locales was to contemplate a taxonomy of taste and tradition that was enriching in its nuance and variety; pieces of lives and livelihoods were wrapped up in the paper parcels of butter or meat that were carefully tied and placed into our hands. Trade never seemed so necessary, or noble.

Back at Camont, we’d set to work making an apple tart, say, or roasting a fowl, preparing dishes in which ingredients exuded such character of color and texture that merely placing a chicken in a pot with leeks and carrots, herbs and bacon, was deeply nourishing; I could have looked at it all day and been satisfied—but, thankfully, hunger always got the upper hand. Of the many discoveries that we made there, the ones that have proven the most enduring, because the most portable, are a taste for armagnac and a delight in the wines of Elian De Ros, which I was thrilled to discover my own wine merchant, back in Connecticut, was familiar with and stocking.

We had such a marvelous time in Gascony that when we began thinking of planning another trip, we thought of Kate again, and signed on for her road trip to Catalunya and the Costa Brava. It would have been our first visit to Spain, but, alas, the pandemic had other plans for us. As the enticing prospect of that journey has disappeared from view, I’ve been brooding—on bad days, at least—on the thought that it may well be the last trip we’ll ever plan, that the world at large will not spin its way back to normal before the vicissitudes of age constrict our lives at small. In such moments, I regret all the places I’ve never yet seen despite always assuming I would—Spain, Greece, Scotland, Sicily, Saint Petersburg—and mourn those—Rome, Venice, Paris, Chartres, Cambridge, Umbria—I long to revisit. And I reach for a book to transport me to one of them. Soon enough, I imagine, a new destination will appear on the horizon, however far away.