A blog turns out to be an education undertaken in public. Its proprietor is more student than teacher, and one is fortunate to encounter numerous tutors along the way, between the covers of books and out there in the bigger world. I seldom sit down at the keyboard with the goal of instructing you, like a pompous schoolmarm. More often I want to share something – a book you might enjoy and a sense of the pleasure it has already given me, or some new nugget of knowledge. I would continue reading and writing without you, but you make the experience more rewarding. Here is a 1958 entry in Michael Oakeshott’s Notebooks 1922-86 (ed. Luke O’Sullivan, Imprint Academic, 2014):  “Concupiscence of experience, boundless curiosity to set our foot everywhere, to enter every possible situation. Montaigne.”   With the proviso that “experience”  and "every possible situation" include “book learning,” I agree. It’s an old paradox, one the Greeks left us, but the older we get and the more we learn, the more we come to recognize our ignorance. In other words, “adult education” is redundant. Dr. Johnson might be describing the care and feeding of a blog when he writes in The Rambler on July 9, 1751:   “The chief art of learning, as Locke has observed, is to attempt but little at a time. The widest excursions of the mind are made by short flights frequently repeated; the most lofty fabrics of science are formed by the continued accumulation of single propositions.”   Anecdotal Evidence today celebrates its nineteenth anniversary. Each day since February 5, 2006, I have posted something except during the hiatus following spinal surgery in 2019. Now, with a renewed backbone, it’s time to get to work.

“. . . I am under the necessity of appearing as an ancient and more or less venerable figure; others may come in aeroplanes, but I arrive on a boneshaker; others may give a demonstration with electric stoves, but I freeze over my doleful brazier. Side-whiskers should have been worn. For tradition, in the eyes of many talented moderns, is what the comedians called ‘so much antimacassar’. She is the mother of the antiquarians . . .”  Some may mistake the words as my own. Playing the backward-facing old fart is always a provocatively comfortable role, though when it comes to literature I favor neither the old nor the new. Rather, my preference is for the good of any age – the stylish, intelligent and emotionally compelling, rather than the dull, witless or strident. Whether a book was written two millennia ago or last week is irrelevant.   The English poet Edmund Blunden was thirty-three when he published the essay quoted above, “Tradition in Poetry,” in the December 1929 issue of The Bookman. During the Great War, Blunden had seen continuous action in the trenches from 1916 to 1918 and survived the fighting at Ypres and the Somme. His friend Siegfried Sassoon said Blunden was the Great War poet most obsessed with his memories of the Western Front. His essay, I suspect, is his reply to the Modernist poets who emerged after the war, specifically Eliot (whom he mentions) and Pound.   Blunden is not attacking innovation in the arts. Rather, he is defending the incorporation of tradition into new work. Every poet builds on the past. No one works entirely in self-imposed isolation. In his own poetry, Blunden honors John Clare and Coleridge, among other precursors. Seasoned readers will recognize his debt to the Romantic tradition in English poetry. He tells us “tradition silently and powerfully intervenes,” and writes:   “The poet is a noble creature, an epoch-making being, but behind him there is this mighty mother, and he is her poem. She brought him up, and in his impressible years gave him association, circumstance, sympathy, distaste, imagery, character—and probably bad handwriting. How much even of our emotions is our own? How much that stirs us is not due to the race, or family, or circle which sent us forward into the world?”   Not only is no man an island. At most he is a peninsula or a densely situated archipelago. Every poet – every writer – is part of a complex kinship arrangement. He may even be unaware of it. As with biological families, he may resent some of his family members, but he’s stuck with them. Here’s how Blunden puts it:   “I have said that the past can assure us how far poetical discovery and adventure is related to what was previously ascertained and imparted. Poetry is a family, and her genealogical tree may be investigated with patience and reward.”   A summary dismissal of the past, of the inherited tradition, is applied nihilism and adolescent presumption, the result is tedium and incoherence: “A relaxed generation contents itself with,” Blundren writes, “no, glories in, a farrago of vapid and dissonant expressions, which are applied more or less without alteration to all heads of interest.”

My understanding of “deliquescing” goes back to high-school chemistry: a solid melts or becomes liquid by absorbing moisture from the air. Kay Ryan uses the word in an unexpectedly metaphorical way in her review of This Craft of Verse (2002), a transcript of the lectures Jorge Luis Borges gave at Harvard in 1967-68. Ryan may be the most precise writer at work today. There’s no mushiness in her choice of language, no sense of almost the right word. When she chooses a surprising word, it’s not sloppy or generic. It means something. She writes in the Borges review:   “[I]t was instead a lovely lightness of spirit. Behind all the lectures I could feel Borges’ abiding dream of deliquescing into the glories of literature. At first this was hard to see because it’s mixed up with his worries about getting things a bit scrambled up, but then there it is: this big egolessness. Borges simply apprehends the inexhaustible radiance of literature and would walk into it naked and without a name, such a lover is he.”   By “deliquescing” in this context I think she means being absorbed by the books we love, so the line where we stop and literature begins is beyond recovery. Like any dedicated reader, much of me – my ways of thinking, my emotional life, the things I find beautiful or otherwise rewarding – come out of books. Reading is a big part of life experience, not a segregated realm. What do I owe Tolstoy or Fulke Greville? I can’t tell you. Here’s the next paragraph in the review:   “And that’s another thing; there is an emphasis upon passion in these lectures and a reliance on feelings that is, I suppose I shouldn’t say contrary to, but outside the universe of Borges’ cool, impersonal, intellectually thrilling fictions. After all, Borges is a thinker who can squander what would be a dozen other writers’ whole intellectual careers in a single story such as ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.’”   A writer needn’t shriek and moan to prove his emotional chops. Borges wrote about gauchos, for God’s sake. Ryan concludes her review:   “Borges’ aesthetic ‘tingling’ recalls Nabokov's famous 'frisson.' The sensation along the spine was probably much the same for these similarly exhilarating masters who grew old so differently--Nabokov becoming ever more defended and riddling, Borges becoming ever more transparent and universal.”   [Ryan’s review of the Borges volume is published in the Winter 2003 issue of The Threepenny Review.]

We have acquired new, smaller bedside tables. More than a third of the surface area is occupied by the alarm clock and a lamp, leaving less space for reading matter. All further accumulation of books and magazines will, of necessity, be vertically arranged, a single stack, which makes it convenient to answer some questions from a reader:  “Do you read more than one book at a time? How do you manage to keep them straight in your head? Do you ever forget what you have already read and have to read it again? What are you reading now?”   The answers: Yes. I don’t know. Yes. Give me a minute.   I’ve never had difficulty reading several books simultaneously. Usually they represent contrasting genres, which minimizes confusion. In other words, I would probably never read Nostromo and War and Peace at the same time. Think of it as exercising different sets of muscles in the body. Sometimes I’ll go weeks without opening an active volume. On occasion, I’ll give up on a book – something I wouldn’t permit myself to do when young. Here are the books and periodicals on my bedside table:   The Complete Essays of J.V. Cunningham (Wiseblood Books, 2024)   Immortal Souls: A Treatise on Human Nature (Editiones Schoolasticae, 2024) by Edward Feser   From the Holy Mountain (Harper Collins, 1997) by William Dalrymple   The Collected Stories of Peter Taylor (Farrar, Straus, 1969)   The New Criterion, January 2024   Both The Claremont Review of Books (Fall 2024) and The Jewish Review of Books (Winter 2025) are published in the tabloid format, so I keep them in the drawer below.   Respectively, literary essays, philosophical text, history, fiction, periodicals. Little chance for confusion. Taylor represents a respite from the other books. I know and love his stories and even met him once back around 1971. I’m reading Cunningham for review so I’m taking heavy notes. The Feser I’m reading out of pure selfishness and, again, taking heavy notes. The Dalrymple volume is a lark.

My first high-school reunion was postponed for a year by the COVID-19 lockdown. We met in 2021 for the fifty-first at a supper club on the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland. Lake Erie was a hundred yards to the north and when conversation lagged, I could watch the ore boats moving down the river. The Cleveland skyline, much of it unrecognizable from childhood, started on the other side of the Cuyahoga. It was a perfect late-summer evening, and we sat on the patio, trying to talk over the “classic rock” blaring from the overhead speakers. I didn’t like the Guess Who in 1970, and that hasn't changed. Nostalgia has become an industry.  I met three of my former teachers, including Linda Wagy, my eight-grade English teacher from 1965-66. It had been her first year teaching and she thoughtfully pretended to remember me. Most of the classmates I had hoped would be there did not attend. The highlight was meeting a woman I knew from thirteen years of public school but hadn’t seen in fifty-one years. I recognized her immediately and even remembered her name. I wrote about our conversation the following day. The dreariest encounter came when I met a guy who has changed his name (his birth name, he explained, had “too many consonants”) and is now a lawyer in Cleveland. He was boring in 1970 and remains so. Boring in a very earnest, strident, self-centered way. It took a long time to shake him so he could bore someone else.   The organizers have announced a fifty-fifth-year reunion to be held in September at the Cleveland Yachting Club, and I plan to go. Mostly I’m curious. In high school I was shy and usually a loner. What friends I had were those I knew from the A.P. classes. My only social involvement was editing the school literary magazine – no dances or sports. There are risks, of course, the principal one being another consonant-free nudnik. The wittily acerbic Louisiana poet Gail White feels otherwise. In “Why I Failed to Attend My High School Reunion,” she says:   “Because it would have gone like this: Hello, hello, hello. (You never liked me, did you? Where was this friendship 15 years ago?) You’re looking wonderful. I wouldn’t kid you about it – you look great. (You hefty cat.) And Jeffrey – are you married? Oh, you are! Three kids? However did you manage that? (For God’s sake, someone point me to the bar.) Me? I’ve just spent the summer in Tibet learning some basics from a Buddhist nun. It’s an experience I won’t forget. (As if you cared.) More crab dip, anyone? (And here’s the Great Class Bore. You’re still the same.) Forgive me. I can’t quite recall your name.”   White explains her poem is “humor based on truth. I’m now 78 and have never been to a class reunion. Nobody who likes me would be there. I didn’t make real friends until I went to college and started meeting people who read books.”