I
How close to the world can one be? How far from the world should one be? Those questions represent two mentalities, two doctrines — the aspiration to nearness, the suspicion of nearness; engagement as a form of strength, engagement as a form of weakness; the hunger for reality, the horror of reality; the nobility of belonging, the nobility of alienation. We begin with the world and we end with it, and we spend our mortal interval ascertaining what to do about the relation, and how to get it right. There are some who draw close because they seek pleasure, or because they seek pain; there are some who fear pain, or fear pleasure, and pull away. Charity, and moral action, demands proximity, but proximity also narrows and deceives and corrupts — and immoral action requires it, too. Beauty enchants, and absorbs, and overwhelms, but it is not obvious that the dissolution of the self is its highest fulfillment, or that sublimity is our best level. And love — does anything imperil the heart more? Love, the commonplace miracle, is the cradle of anxiety; its fragility casts a shadow over the very happiness that it confers. The truly happy man, it would seem, is the man who lives only in the present and alone, which is to say, the man who is without a father or a mother, a son or a daughter, a lover or a spouse or a friend, which is to say, almost no man, really. A man with a memory is hardly alone. Even solitariness is a kind of social relation, which may be refined into solitude. The world comes with terms.
One of the greatest satisfactions in the history of philosophy is the inconsistency, even the hypocrisy, of the Stoics. For as long as I have studied them, I have quarreled with them. Like the late Tolstoy, they get into your head. The Stoics were meticulous students of human breakability and raised it into a subject for philosophy. Nobody in the West ever pondered more rigorously the actualities of pain. The integrity of their ideal — tranquility of mind achieved by the stilling of strong feelings — is incontrovertible. Who lives too serenely? And incontrovertible, too, is their portrait of the assault of the world upon the soul, and of the soul’s consequent dispersal by stimulations and attachments. Experience is the enemy of composure; poise must be wrested from circumstance; we are taught by being troubled. When I encounter equanimity, then, I feel envy. And yet I have always believed that the price of Stoic equanimity may be too high. The virtue that it recommends is achieved by an ordeal of paring down and stripping away and pulling back that looks to me like a process of dehumanization. What is the self-sufficient self, if not the self that exaggerates its own resources? Where is the line between self-sufficiency and self-satisfaction? This is why the inconsistencies of the Stoics delight me, why I even gloat in their failures. And this is why the literature of Stoicism — and of Pyrrhonism and Epicureanism — is riddled, when read closely, with exceptions to the lofty rule of wise retirement.
Stilpo was a philosopher in Megara in the late fourth and early third centuries B.C.E. and the teacher of Zeno, the Cypriot thinker who founded Stoicism. Seneca relates that “Stilpo’s homeland fell to invaders; his children were lost, his wife was lost, and he alone survived the destruction of his people. Yet he emerged happy; and when Demetrius, who was called Poliorcetes, or City-Sacker, asked him whether he lost anything, he replied: ‘All my goods are with me.’” Seneca extols him for thinking that “nothing is good which can be taken away.” He “conquered even his enemy’s conquest. ‘I have lost nothing’, he said. How amazing is this man, who escaped fire, sword, and devastation, not only without injury but even without loss!” Nothing is good that can be taken away: was this man a saint of indifference or a monster of indifference? There are other testimonies, other ancient exempla, equally stirring or shocking, in praise of imperturbability. The father of this tradition of virtuous passivity was Pyrrho, who began as a painter and founded the school known as Skepticism (which is not to be confused with skepticism). He outfitted indifference with an epistemology. In the company of his teacher Anaxarchus, he travelled to India with Alexander the Great, where no doubt he encountered Eastern varieties of philosophical quietism. It is said that Anaxarchus once fell into a ditch and Pyrrho walked right past him, without any offer of assistance, as evidence of his immunity to attachment. Diogenes Laertius relates that when Pyrrho was attacked by a dog and recoiled in fright, he apologized for his panic, pleading that “it was difficult entirely to strip away human nature,” which was otherwise his goal. According to Diogenes, Pyrrho’s principled obliviousness was perfect: “avoiding nothing, taking no precautions, facing everything as it came, whether wagons, cliffs, or dogs.”
The problem with Pyrrho’s extraordinary consistency is not only that it was fanatical, and like all fanaticism intellec-tually facile. It was also a little fraudulent: Diogenes further reports that “he was kept safe, as Antigonus of Carystus says, by the friends who accompanied him.” A detachment of attached people to protect his detachment. How could they stand him? Places, everybody! Pyrrho needs to be alone! A reputation for holiness is the best protection. The conclusion that must be drawn from Pyrrho’s amusing arrangement is that the values of apatheia, or freedom from strong feeling, and of ataraxia, or tranquillity of mind, the magnificent ideals of the ancient proponents of withdrawal and placidity, are not magnificent after all; or if they are magnificent, they are not practicable; or if they are practicable, they are premised on the worldly involvements of others, on a surrounding population of perturbables. The sight of equanimity should inspire not only envy, then, but also doubt. Seneca produced his elevating letters to Lucilius in the same years in which he stooped to the lowest court politics in Rome, with catastrophic results. Was he a hypocrite, or merely a human?
There were thinkers who codified the inconsistencies of the wise man and conceptually extenuated his philosophically embarrassing needs. In his life of Zeno, Diogenes offers a brief analysis on the ways in which objects and qualities may be classified as indifferent. “Of indifferent things they say that some are preferred, others rejected. The preferred have value, whereas the rejected lack value.” The delicious notion of preferred indifferents is the backdoor through which the commitments of existence re-enter the Stoic life. “Of the preferred things, some are preferred for their own sake, others for the sake of something else, and still others both for their own sake and for the sake of something else.” It is hard not to smile at this casuistry of humaneness. There is something affecting about its intellectually tortured way of rehabilitating imperfection and vindicating the unlikelihood of a complete escape from the human muddle.
The preferred indifferents include other people. Whereas Epictetus warns that the good supersedes all ties of kinship, and Cicero argues against Camus that parricide is justifiable because the son of a tyrant may “prefer the well-being of his fatherland over that of his father,” and Seneca cites approvingly the case of a good man who murdered his own sons, there is in Stoic writings a kind of creeping reconnection of the sage to others, a restoration of the human bonds that have just been deplored, a recognition of the intrinsic value of certain social relationships. Having been demoted as impediments to the development of the rational and virtuous individual — Philo of Alexandria, in one of his least Jewish moments, declares that a man who takes a wife and has children “has passed from freedom to slavery” — there is ample discussion of the merits of marriage, on the assumption that, in the words of scripture, it is not good for man to be alone. The proper qualities for a spouse are deliberated upon, and fertility is not primary among them. Arius Didymus, also of Alexandria, who was Augustus’ teacher, stated that the sage should marry and have children because “these things follow from the nature of a rational animal designed for community and mutual affection.” It would appear that we have left behind the war on worry.
So detachment is not all, and disruptions of serenity are admitted. The sociable Stoic: is he a contradiction, or one of culture’s great tributes to complexity? In the literature of friendship, certainly, the Stoics are among the founders. Friends are highly preferred indifferents; they are even instances of the good. Many eloquent passages could be cited. Seneca writes to Lucilius with passion about this passion, thereby doubling the sin. “The wise person loves his friends very deeply,” he says, explicitly joining wisdom to emotion. He calls the Stoic sage an “artist at friend-making” and proclaims “the grandeur of friendship.” He is offended by friendship that is based on expedience or utility. “What brings [the wise man] to friendship is not his own expediency but a natural instinct.” Seneca’s description of the motive for friendship is not only rational, it is almost romantic: “Why make a friend? To have someone I can die for, someone I can accompany into exile, someone whose life I can save, even by laying down my own.” The world has its hooks in this man. Not for him a callous walk past that ditch. And more: “One could even say that love is a friendship gone mad.” (One could also say that friendship is a love gone sane.) “Friendship is choice-worthy in itself,” Seneca explains, “and if friendship is choice-worthy in itself, then it is possible for one who is self-sufficient to pursue it.” A splendid result. In my tradition this sort of category-split-ting, of dialectical rigging, is known, not altogether favorably, as pilpul — but this is pilpul against the impoverishment of life, pagan pilpul, beautiful pilpul. One of the purposes of pilpul was anyway to make life more livable.
The self-sufficient individual with needs and with bonds: this is not an anchorite dream, and it harbors no longing for the desert. Do such individuals exist? The truth is that the streets may be full of them, in differing degrees of inner strength and outer connection; not sages, exactly, but men and women surprised by events and beset by hardships and summoning the reason and the solidarity that is necessary to endure them, fighting off fear and struggling with dread, ordering feelings or choosing a dignified way not to order them, reckoning with the limitations of their wills, ruefully noticing transience, answering to some conception of the good life; not Stoics, exactly, but neither thoughtless nor helpless, and not without the capabilities of self-possession, and of understanding, and of courage. Here is Seneca’s characterization of the Stoic at home: “He is self-sufficient, and yet takes a wife; self-sufficient, and yet raises children; self-sufficient, and yet would not live at all if it meant living without other people.”
The ataraxic hearth? At this point the reasonableness of the picture becomes irksome, and the initial radicalism of the recommended discipline begins to seem implausible. Can the Stoic have it all? Is no significant renunciation necessary? If nothing is good that can be taken away, how can family and friendship be good? For they will be taken away from me as surely as I will be taken away from them. The original objection against the dependency of human affections, the warning against caring, is still valid: it is indubitably an invitation to pain. Good morning, heartache, sit down. Loss is the end of the story of every bond, and also the condition of its urgency. Eternal life, were it possible, would be no guarantee of eternal love, because eternity is the enemy of love. In our enthrallment to our vision of the good life, have we forgotten what we know about the lived life? There are not many things we can confidently foretell about the future, but it is safe to prophesy that it holds bitterness. It holds bitterness because it holds loss. Loves and friendships provide the specifications of our eventual bereavements.
This is morbid, but every effort to prepare for mortality is morbid. For this reason, one of the central exertions of Stoic spirituality is the attempt to separate bitterness from loss — to preempt sorrow with reflection. “The wise person,” Seneca writes, “is not afflicted by the loss of children or of friends, because he endures their death in the same spirit as he awaits his own. He does not fear the one any more than he grieves over the other.” For “all anxiety and worry is dishonorable.” Dishonorable! I scan those words and I grant the rationality in them. It may be that one day I will be able to regard the prospect of my own death with equanimity, not only so as to die freely, as the philosophers say, but also so as to find the words and the glances that will ease the sorrow of my mourners. But the death of my family and the death of my friends? I cannot do this. I will not do this. I will mourn. It is the failure to mourn that is dishonorable: a treason, a misrepresentation. The abrogation of grief by reason looks to me like the violation of a duty, and like an imperialism of reason. My tears will flow as a sort of somatic entailment, a physical proof, of my interrupted attachment. Perhaps I am soft, or insufficiently logical; or it may be that I hold a different view.
I was rudely thrown into these matters when, in the space of a week, two of my most preferred indifferents, two of my most cherished friends, died.
II
I met Adam Zagajewski in Paris three decades or so ago and it was love at first sight, or at least at first sound. Since that lucky day our conversation was constant, in every medium, until last spring, when he selfishly died. We were introduced by Tzvetan Todorov, a mutual friend, a sterling man with a soft, hopeful voice and curly silver hair, a radical who became a liberal, a Maoist who became a humanist, a rarity. Tzvetan and Adam and the American poet C.K., or Charlie, Williams were a circle of fellowship and cultivation in Paris, all of them expatriates, all of them serious but none of them earnest, offering ideas the way people used to offer cigarettes, sharing new work, merrily mocking cant, scouring the world for things to admire. They did me the honor of allowing me in, and Joseph Frank too, Dostoevsky’s sweet and bearish and masterly biographer: Charlie once joked that Joe and I were corresponding members of the little academy.
Adam was the first person I ever met who disliked Paris: except for Tzvetan and Charlie and a few others, almost all of them gone now, Adam was lonely there, and his poems were not read. It was in Paris that we began our history of walks — of the reveries of unsolitary walkers, in Paris and in Krakow and in Amsterdam and in Chicago and in New York. We wandered aimlessly, talking and laughing and reciting — “poems from poems, songs/ from songs, paintings from paintings,/ always this friendly/ impregnation…” There was usually a museum on our itineraries. Once we had three whole hours together at the Rijksmuseum, which under each other’s influence became an afternoon of shared trances. I recall how we stood before Vermeer’s milkmaid, transfixed in a unitary focus upon the gentle pour of milk from her pitcher to her bowl, which is the heroic action of the picture, the spill leaving the red clay above in a delicate spout-shaped triangle and becoming a sure white line, a gentle vertical crux, as it falls into the red clay below. We agreed that this small passage was nothing less than a portrait of time. This most humble of scenes broached this least humble of subjects. We watched the liquid flow but not move, and we agreed that the painter had found a retort to Heraclitus’ river. Then we walked on, in a happy aesthetic daze, and trained ourselves on the stupendous facture in The Jewish Bride (now properly re-named Isaac and Rebecca), perhaps the greatest parcel of painted canvas in the world. In unison we were utterly bored by the notion that what Rembrandt had accomplished was an exciting anticipation of abstraction. For us the excitement lay in the fact that the glittering mess of pigments before our eyes was a representation. At Adam’s request, I recited a few verses of the story of Isaac and Rebecca in Hebrew, for the music of it, a story that is noteworthy because the furtive sex that it depicts is not forbidden; it is secret, but it is not illicit. The secret is that the lovers are husband and wife. A wholesome scandal, we chuckled, and strolled to the next gallery. (Years later Adam wrote to me: “The Rijksmuseum: I remember exactly those beautiful moments in front of the masterpieces. Very elitist.”)
The walks I treasured the most were in Krakow, because Adam lived there. I came once to give a lecture in memory of Czeslaw Milosz at the Jewish Cultural Center, which was run by a kind soul named Joachim Russek, a “righteous Gentile” if ever there was one. It was located in Kazimierz, the old Jewish district that is home to a large and venerable population of ghosts. One afternoon I was drawn by the window of an antiques shop on Josefa Street, which had been the main thoroughfare of the neighborhood, but I fled the shop immediately when I realized whose salons those elegant objects had once adorned. I was especially glad to have Adam’s company, because my trip was a disquieting one: a few days after my lecture I was to cross the border at Przemysl into Ukraine and visit my parents’ hometowns, in the region of Galicia that is soaked with my family’s blood. I needed a friend.
The subject of my lecture was Jewish messianism, which I had been studying for a long time and arriving at unconventional conclusions, and Adam was in attendance. After the lecture we set out across the city and he wanted to know more about a distinction that I had made between the messianic predicament of the Jews and the messianic predicament of the Christians. For the Jews, I said, the problem is that the redeemer does not arrive and the world stays the same; but for the Christians, the problem is that the redeemer did arrive and the world stays the same. They each have theological traditions of adjusting to the eschatological flaws in their respective situations. I suggested that I preferred what the Jews do not yet know to what the Christians already know. Who wants to wake up the morning after redemption? The coffee will still have to be made. The internet will be ablaze with the advent, but injustice will still abound and banality will still threaten everything. Adam wondered whether this was not similar to a dilemma that we had been discussing for years, which we called “after ecstasy.” It was a dilemma broached by mysticism and by eros and by music — by Mahler especially, for Adam. How can Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, that monument to the limitless-ness of yearning, end? How dare it end? And in what spirit does one breathe when it is over? Can memory adequately contain ecstasy? Or does the quest for ecstasy doom us to a grim alternative between frustration and repetition, with its deadening consequences, the way the search for love can come to ruin in chastity or promiscuity? By now we were in the rynek, the city’s grand square. The hour was late and it was deserted; the open market, where I had been dismayed, but not surprised, to discover tiny wooden figures of Jews with a beard and a penny attached to them, was gone, and the cafes were closed. “Do you want to visit the ermine tomorrow?” Adam cheerfully asked.
I wanted to visit the ermine. In a small museum that houses the various collections of the aristocratic Czartoryski family, there hangs a strange and important picture by Leonardo called The Lady with the Ermine. The weasel-like creature held closely by the noble lady is an allegory for certain virtues, and the painting had many adventures during the world wars. But it was not the main event for the morning. There was something else that Adam wanted to show me, an object that for him was the secular equivalent of a religious relic. We walked over to the Collegium Maius, which is the museum of the Jagellonian University, where we visited a stuffy green room in the middle of which stood, in bright wood on a bright wooden floor, one of Chopin’s pianos. He used it on a concert tour of Scotland in 1847, and he inscribed his name inside it. If Adam had a god, it was Chopin. He always pronounced the name with reverence. He found the cosmos in Chopin’s pieces. He had highly developed views about the interpreters; I never squandered an opportunity to listen to any interpretation with him; I learned so much. Ekphrasis is the ancient literary technique of making poetry out of painting, by describing in verse a particular work of visual art. Adam was an ekphrastic poet — I especially adore his poem about Morandi — but the inspiring art was usually music. Ut musica poesis. When he died, at a wretched loss for how to grieve for him, I began to listen to Chopin, and Schubert, and Scarlatti, over and over again, with a ritual intensity, and Bach (“das Wolhtemperierte,” he exclaimed in an email, “it’s the whole world”), and Chopin again, and all the Edwin Fischer I could find, until I began to feel not only that I was listening for him, that I would be his ears the way we had together been each other’s eyes, but also that I was consoling the composers for his loss. The poor bereft geniuses, they will never be heard by him again.
We left the holy piano for a leisurely walk in the Planty Gardens, one of the largest parks in Krakow, which traces the contours of the medieval walls of the old city. Here, too, I was haunted: I have a photograph of my parents in the Planty Gardens in 1945, immediately after their liberation. My father briskly wears a Polish officer’s uniform and my mother, an elegant woman even when shattered, appears in a smart dark coat with a hat tilted stylishly above her graciously smiling face. They had been in hell only months before. Now they were living under fictitious names, my father masquer-ading as a military man, because it was dangerous for Jews to become known to their Russian liberators; and when someone recognized my father on a reviewing stand and threatened to inform on him, they jumped a train and left the curse that was Poland. I told Adam the story, and our conversation turned to an early poem in which he compared Celan’s “Deathfugue” to Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, until finally we arrived at our next destination, which was Boguslawskiego Street. Milosz had lived and died in an apartment in number 6, and Adam had arranged for us to visit it.
He gave me a great gift. That huge man, that giant redwood of a man, that man of infinite and indestructible spirit, that writer before whom tyrants eventually fell, that poet who wrote imperishably about the burning of the Warsaw Ghetto from the other side of the ghetto wall — he had been both our friend. Adam was his spiritual son. I earned Czeslaw’s friendship in 1981 with a piece in The New Republic, of blessed memory, in which I was harshly critical of certain American intellectuals who were advising the American government to do nothing about General Jaruzelski’s crackdown on Solidarity, and our friendship lasted until he was too weak to pick up a pen. His flat was as small as he was large. His slippers were still in place, and some of his books still stood next to his nondescript desk; and on a wall in the living room was a painting by his old friend Josef Czapski, who survived the Katyn massacre to become a profound painter, a profound writer, and by all accounts a saint. (The last gift I received from Adam, only a few months before he died, was a handsome monograph on Czapski’s art, to which he contributed one of the finest essays he ever wrote.) From the apartment we found our way to the Basilica of St. Michael the Archangel, specif-ically to its crypt, one of Poland’s pantheons, where Czeslaw is buried. Adam asked a stranger to take a photograph of us standing next to the heavy marble sarcophagus. On our faces is an unmistakable look of gratitude.
“Now again in Krakow, trying to encourage my soul to emerge from its hiding place.” “The London Derek Walcott evening was very moving, but of course a soccer match would draw a hundred thousand more people.” “The other day I heard the first Violin Concerto by Shostakovitch by the Krakow Philharmonic. And then you remember how he waited for the NKVD by the elevator.” “I’m writing again (I attach a recent elegy for Charlie) and I keep my anger alive, the anger at our stupid nationalistic government. Instead of Lenin and Stalin we now have Mary, Jesus, and Pilsudski.” “I know that not everyone is keen on spiritual life. I noticed it some time ago and I can still barely believe it.” “My voice is gone and my higher mind too. Do you ever have weeks when your higher mind disappears? But what a joy when it returns.” And there were the inscriptions: “to my younger brother, able to combine wit and metaphysics (what’s better than that?)…”; “to my brother in the seeking business…” Every word I ever had from Adam, in his letters and in his books, no matter how sad or dour, was fortifying. As in his poems, so in his emails: he had an uncanny way of mingling the lyrical with the mordant, the magically dreamed with the keenly observed, the fanciful with the true, the elegiac with the risible. It was all done without raising his voice, even in his courageous anti-communist essays of the late 1960s and early 1970s. He spoke slowly, as if to leave time for his meaning to reach you before his irony. He loved mystery but he hated obscurity. His work carried the patrimony of European humanism into an allegedly post-humanist era. He was crazy about Billie Holiday. He was a great boon for the seeking business.
III
I met Larry McMurtry in 1989, at the public meeting of solidarity and protest that PEN tardily organized in New York in support of Salman Rushdie, who had recently gone into hiding to escape the fatwa against his novel and his life. I say tardily, because in the immediate aftermath of the Iranian outrage against freedom and literature many of the literary titans of the city were scared into silence, flattering themselves that sleeper agents were coming for them too, as if the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic had strong feelings about, say, Billy Bathgate. Rushdie’s publisher was also running for cover. But finally the event did take place, in an empty store-front not far from PEN’s offices at Broadway and Prince. The space filled quickly; people spilled out into the street. The cramped and rushed scene suited the emergency, which was real. The speakers included Sontag, who was president of PEN at the time, Mailer, Doctorow, Diana Trilling, Said, Talese (who bizarrely chose to honor the moment by reciting the Lord’s Prayer, which was sort of what had gotten us into this mess), McMurtry, and myself. When it was over, Larry came over to me and said: “You’re in Washington and I’m in Washington. Come to the bookshop next week.”
The bookshop was Booked Up, one of four antiquarian bookstores that Larry owned around the country. He was not only a writer, he was also a “bookman”; he was narcotically addicted to books, high and low, old and new, he loved unpacking them and shelving them and pricing them and reading them and writing them, all in great numbers. His personal library in Archer City, Texas held more than thirty thousand volumes, and was a personal library, that is, the books on those floor-to-ceiling shelves were, in their genres and their subjects, expressions only of what most interested him. A library is not a bookstore. A true library excludes things, because nobody can care about everything. Nobody should care about everything. Larry had the entirety of the bibliographical map in his head, but he lived most fully in certain precincts of it. In Georgetown, Booked Up occupied both corners of Wisconsin and 31st Street. There were treasures there. The ones that moved me most were original copies of Mont-St. Michel and Chartres and The Education of Henry Adams, privately printed in the first years of the twentieth century by their increasingly incandescent author, in a large format bound in blue cloth, legendary books, and both of them signed by their author, the greatest writer who ever lived in the capital. The signatures themselves told the story of Adams’ last years: the first in a confident hand, the second in a hand that shook with the results of a stroke. I recall that each of them was priced in five figures, though I never believed that Larry, or his shrewd and charming partner Marcia Carter, would sell them.
For me, they glowed in the dark. So did other volumes, some of which I was able to afford by the kindness of the house: the 1669 edition of Thomas Browne, complete with portrait and quincunx and urns, and the jewel-like first edition of The Black Riders and Other Lines by Stephen Crane, published in Boston in 1895, a book the size of your hand, its verses printed all in capital letters, its cover decadently illustrated by a black vine creeping across the cream-colored boards. Over the years Larry generously sent me books that reminded him of my obsessions, usually as they came out of the boxes which libraries and collectors had shipped to him. The most spectacular offering of all was Eliezer ben Yehuda’s vast dictionary, in eight huge volumes, of the “modern and ancient” Hebrew language, which he began to publish in 1910, complete with its “Great Introduction.” I was a little delirious when I saw the spines. This was the epic work of erudition and fanaticism that re-established — no, established, since no Jew ever spoke Hebrew before Ben Yehuda the way an entire Jewish society spoke Hebrew after Ben Yehuda — the language of the Jewish people. “I figure if you can’t use this, you’ll know someone who needs it,” Larry’s letter said. “Me in my role as the Last Bookman.” He went on to lament the decline of the trade in his time. “It’s come down to me, Peter Howard, and Bill Resse. When this generation wastes….”
Anyway, we agreed to meet at Booked Up in Georgetown the following week. He was waiting for me at the bottom of the rickety metal staircase that ran up the side of the building to the second-floor entrance. He was holding a key. “This is for you”, he said and placed it in my hand. “You might need a place to write. I write on the second floor. Your desk is on the third.” He was like that. The place became my lair, especially when Larry was in town. He worked and slept in a tiny room just off Philosophy and Theology, with a small writing table and a monk’s bed. The clacking of his old typewriter downstairs rattled me, but not because of the noise. It was the reproving sound of his preternatural productivity. As I sat above him pondering the shape of an essay, or more often, losing myself in another book that I found on another shelf, the typed pages were piling high on his desk below — novel after novel, Some Can Whistle, tap tap tap, The Evening Star, tap tap tap, The Streets of Laredo, tap tap tap, Duane’s Depressed, tap tap tap. He had so many stories in him. More, he relished the company of his characters. To paraphrase the screenplay for which he accepted an Oscar in jeans, he didn’t know how to quit them. Sometimes we unpacked boxes together — I remember a long night excavating all of Huntington Cairns’ library, a humanist’s candy store. Like anyone who appreciates the erotics of browsing, I was helpless there. One night I went up to the roof for some air, only to find a wooden structure that contained the contents of the Phoenix, a renowned and recently shuttered poetry bookshop in Greenwich Village. It was there that I discovered, in many copies, The Platonic Blow by W.H. Auden, published in 1965 (without the poet’s permission, I later learned) by The Fuck You Press, a work with which I was not familiar. A man’s education never ends.
When Larry was invited to a fancy dinner in Georgetown or at the White House, he would return to Booked Up to write a hilarious account of what he had seen and heard — and in the morning I would find those anthropological reports from the field faxed to my office at my magazine. (Those were the days of glossy paper and fading ink, and I did not have the sense to copy them.) He was the most perspicacious fly on the wall who ever lived. If Larry was taciturn, it was usually because he was taking notes. About people, he missed nothing, as his novels show. He had Balzac’s appetite for types and temperaments. In the years when he was president of PEN — a cultural comedy of the first order, though he was diligent in his duties and they brought him east more often — Larry regaled me, usually at a French restaurant up the street over his favorite Montrachet, with his impressions of the solemnities of Manhattan. (Some of this delightful material appears in Literary Life: A Second Memoir.) These were followed by the inanities of Hollywood. The business of Washington rarely figured in our conversations; politics interested him only as another spectacle of human idiosyncrasy. We also pondered the devastating emotional effects of a heart operation that he underwent a few years after we became friends. He never completely escaped its shadow.
Yet our many meals together were also something else, for me: a long course in the American West. Larry was supremely a man of his place. He was a scholar of it; his text was the land and its vicissitudes, its people and their scars, which he knew with as much authority as any scholar I have ever known has ever known anything. I admired Larry for his immersion: it is good not only to come from somewhere, but to know well from where one comes. In the tradition of writers who are universal but not cosmopolitan, Larry’s corner of the earth sufficed to fascinate him forever. This is evident in his books: they are full of detail but they are not made of research, as so many American novels are. (Richly imagined, those novels are usually called.) Gore Vidal once said, about his novel Lincoln, that he would read the historians in the evening and write the chapter in the morning. Not Larry; he came fully and naturally prepared. The history, the geography, the mythologies, the facts: he commanded them all. About his subjects he was sovereign. This freed him for imaginative play and social criticism. He once wrote a little book called Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen in which he pretty much sided with the Dairy Queen.
At one of our dinners we were talking about Native Americans, and he was introducing me to the tribes of the Southwest and telling me what to read for further instruc-tion, when he came to the tale of an American scout, I think it was Kit Carson, who had a famous fight with an Indian chief. According to legend, they met in the middle of a creek and fought mano a mano until the American hero vanquished his opponent in a fine spirit of manifest destiny. “Well, the truth isn’t that,” Larry said. “The truth is that Carson waited for the Indian to show up and shot him in the back.” Manifest destiny, indeed. And then Larry added: “Which is exactly what he should have done.” I was startled, of course. But I learned some things about my friend from his laconic and unsentimental remark. There was nothing triumphalist about his defense of Carson’s ambush. Larry was a man without prejudice, and his down-to-the-ground Americanism was utterly devoid of the ugliness that mars American identity in his parts of the country. He merely understood that the world, and the West, is harsh, and he liked that the American scout knew the score. Larry once showed me an old photograph of the women in his family in Archer County a few generations back – I think it is reproduced in one of his books — because he wanted me to see the toll that life on that unforgiving territory had taken on their faces and their bodies. He had little patience with unreality and much patience with reality.
Larry admired many people but he idealized nobody. He was the sworn foe of Liberty Valance-ism: he never printed the legend. Instead, in his writing and in his demeanor, he was a remorseless demythologizer. He often brought to mind a precious sentence from Hawthorne: “Let us thank God for having given us such ancestors; and let each successive genera-tion thank him, not less fervently, for being one step further from them in the march of ages.” His critical essays about Texas irritated many of his readers because he insisted that the beating heart of the state is to be found in its cities. In his “lecture” to me on Buffalo Bill and the transformation of the old West into entertainment, he concluded that “the old West” existed only for twenty years or so, but I heard no disenchantment in his voice. He was pre-disenchanted, which is what made The Last Picture Show a great film and Lonesome Dove a great book.
Archer City is a two-hour drive northwest from Dallas. It is a small town with a small population, the county seat, a place for roads to meet, with no feeling of a future. Jesse James hid out there. When I used to visit, it looked exactly as Peter Bogdanovich had filmed it. The movie house was a poetical ruin, as if it had been built to be best enjoyed in memory and most truly seen in a rearview mirror. The hospital that appears in the film became the Lonesome Dove Inn, where I enjoyed the blandishments of the Terms of Endearment suite. Larry had transformed four large buildings in the center of town into four large bookshops. Book Town, it came to be called. (Some years ago, as his health began to fail, he threw a big party and auctioned off three shops and three hundred thousand books.) The main store was down the street from the courthouse. The rarest holdings were there, and some literary memorabilia. From a comfortable chair in a corner in the front room Larry would greet visitors — bibliophiles and book dealers and locals looking for old books about Texas and writers from all over the country who heard that it was very cool. There was almost nothing to do at night in Archer City. At the American Legion hall I learned the Texas two-step and was regaled by the inebriated reminiscences of a toothless old oilman named Green. When Larry had guests, however, he provided for their nights: he kept the bookshops unlocked. So when sleep failed, as it often did, I would leave my bed for the deserted streets, where the only activity was the changing light at the crossroads, and ramble in the entirety of our literary civilization until dawn. Sleeplessness was never sweeter. My only responsibility was to turn the lights off. On my walk home my head swam with the rewards of serendipity, with the unexpected phrases and images and names and ideas that I encountered in the nocturnal sanctuary that my friend had created for people like us, but mainly I thought: I love this man, who keeps the lights on.
IV
Seneca’s ninth letter to Lucilius treats the loss of a friend. It begins by clarifying that his hostility to emotionalism does not require the elimination of emotion. “Our position differs from theirs in that our wise person conquers all adversities, but still feels them; but theirs does not even feel them.” The sage is stringent, not grotesque. Yet even this concession to human frailty is limited: whereas the sage acknowledges feeling, because feelings are natural and the Stoic aspires to live in accordance with nature, Seneca advises Lucilius that his ideal should nonetheless be “the invulnerable mind.” This insistence upon invulnerability must have originated in an exceptional vulnerability. Only someone who feels deeply would be so alarmed by depth of feeling.
Yet the antidote to tender-heartedness cannot be hard-heartedness. Seneca compares the loss of a friend to the loss of a limb — it is an amputation. But the comparison is surprisingly unsympathetic: it is designed to minimize the injury, not to magnify it. “There are times when he is satisfied with just part of himself. He will be as happy with his body diminished as he was with it whole.” Surely there will be other times too, when he will be unsatisfied with his mutilation, but the philosopher continues in the same toughening spirit: “He is self-sufficient, not in that he wants to be without a friend, but that he is able to — by which I mean that he bears the loss with equanimity.” It is certainly the case that the maimed man has no choice: he will use his good eye or his remaining hand. (If you have ever seen a three-legged dog enjoying an afternoon in the park, you have seen this equanimity, and you have been touched by its unreflectiveness.) But do not approach the maimed man with solace, the Stoic counsels. It would be a philosophical error. In this account, the death of a friend is not an occasion for consolation, because reason will have obviated the need.
The philosopher goes further, into the farther reaches of detachment where Stoicism becomes obnoxious. No consolation for the loss of a friend will be required, Seneca adds, because the sage turns out to have picked up a certain emotional efficiency. “In truth he will never be without a friend, for it rests with him how quickly he gets a replacement. Just as Phidias, if he should lose one of his statues, would immediately make another, so this artist at friend-making will substitute another in place of the one who is lost.” All he has to do is swipe right! In passages such as this one, the consolatory tradition of the Stoics, to which Seneca also contributed, begins to look a little phony. The death of a friend is quite obviously not the death of friendship. When my friend dies, I do not miss friendship, I miss my friend. All of Phidias’ statues may have been alike, but no two individuals are the same. And even Phidias might have noted that his reproductions were not perfect, and that there are no exact equivalences in human affairs. It should not take a sage to recognize that there are no “replacements.” The uniqueness of what has disappeared, its gorgeous specificity, is precisely the source of the pain. And the avoidance of the pain, the tranquility of mind that is the increasingly desperate master of these proceedings, has been accomplished by means of a shallow notion of human commensurability.
As James McMurtry, of Archer City and Austin, likes to sing, “I don’t want another drink, I only want that last one again.” There is the problem of sorrow. The general awareness of our mortality may be of limited value in summoning the courage to confront individual mortalities. Human finitude is universal, but Adam Zagajewski and Larry McMurtry were particular. No one like them will ever live again. Of course we do not expect our friends to live forever, but such “stoicism” is useless when the wounding day arrives, because we cared too much before to care less, or not at all, now. There is no profit in the attempt of the philosopher of indifference to defend the heart with definitions. One more text, then, this one from Epictetus, which I offer in praise of all the actually existing people whose specificities refute it: “In the case of everything attractive or useful, or that you are fond of, remember to say just what sort of thing it is, beginning with the least little things. If you are fond of a jug, say, ‘I am fond of a jug!’ For when it is broken you will not be upset. If you kiss your child or your wife, say that you are kissing a human being; for when it dies you will not be upset.” It! But not even two jugs are identical, if they were made by human hands, and if you think they are identical then you have no eye for jugs. The collapse of such discernment should not be dignified as wisdom. The differences between people are what draw them to each other. If there is such a thing as species-love, it is not the highest love, or the most strenuous love, or the love that gets one through the night.
“Anyone who complains that a person has died is complaining that that person was human,” Seneca snaps. He takes mourners for fools. Their dejection is an intellectual misunderstanding. “Nothing is more foolish than seeking a reputation for sorrow and giving one’s approval to tears.” Are tears in need of approval? The disapproval of them seems so haughty, so cold. Whereas “the wise, too, shed tears,” this is only because “one can be tranquil and composed even in the midst of tears.” Seneca does not say how. But is there really nothing worse than a lapse of composure? Surely rationalists, or especially rationalists, may break down, and have their outlook tested by the tremendous unreason of experience. Were Mill’s tears bad for him, or for philosophy? Reason will not gain followers by attempting to recruit them where it does not belong. There will be time enough for argument when the tears dry. Like other thinkers in other traditions, Seneca warns against the excesses of grief, but his warning is hollow because he derides grief. He believes it is chiefly a social performance: “The show of grief demands more of us than grief itself requires. Without a spectator, grief comes to an end.” Yet the opposite is more often the case: it is when the others leave, when the spectators and the consolers are gone, that the quiet ravages of sorrow begin.
And then one learns, in desolation, not about the limits of sorrow but about the limits of solace. If consolation is difficult, it may be because consolation is impossible. When a person dies the world changes, once and for all, for those with whom, closely or distantly, he lived. The world is the people with whom one goes through the world. The emotional efficiency of the philosophical Stoics, which bears a resemblance to the emotional efficiency of the unphilosophical Americans, scants the finality of what has occurred. Religions seek the same evasion with their fantasies of resurrection, but resurrections and replacements are equally outlandish responses to the circumstance in which (as the Talmud says) something has been lost which shall not be found again. Too much grieving is hardly our problem. We can anyway count on the world for distractions from it. But respites may be the most we can hope for. There is nothing temporary about mourning; it is an essential view of an essential characteristic of human life. Since ephemerality is permanent, so is sorrow. We may set it aside, we may diversify it with lighter emotions that are warranted by lighter incidents, but it is never wrong. Sorrow befits the sage. Anyone who has ever loved may speak in praise of inconsolability.
