“History is not some past from which we are cut off. We are merely at its forward edge as it unrolls. And only if one is without historical feeling at all can one think of the intellectual fads and fashions of one’s own time as a ‘habitation everlasting.’ We may feel that at last, unlike all previous generations, we have found certitude. They thought so too.”  I heard it expressed by commencement speakers and others in more casual conversation that ours is an unprecedented age of uncertainty and worry. “We have never seen anything like what we’re experiencing now,” said an articulate and highly educated woman. I wanted to remind her of, say, April 1861 in the U.S. and September 1939 everywhere. The phenomenon of presentism is like a disease that causes blindness. We attribute a sort of proud uniqueness to ourselves and our era, an understanding fostered by narcissism and historical ignorance.   The speaker quoted at the top is Robert Conquest in “History, Humanity, and Truth,” the 1993 Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities delivered at Stanford University. Conquest is the historian who gave us, among other revelatory works, The Great Terror: Stalin’s Purge of the Thirties (1968) and The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine (1986). He was not the first to note the moral parity of Hitler and Stalin, but, even before Solzhenitsyn, he documented it and published the results. Denying history and privileging oneself is a form of reality denial. In John Dryden’s “Secular Masque,” Janus says, “Tis well an old age is out, / And time to begin a new,” though the new is merely the old repackaged. Conquest says in his lecture:   “We spoke of fads and fashions. Fanaticisms and factiousnesses too, unfortunately. The Soviet experience was, of course, a terrible example of what can happen when an idea gets out of hand.”   Conquest was doubly blessed with gifts, being a poet as well as a historian. In 2009, already in his nineties, Conquest published Penultimata, a collection of new poems. Among them is “Last Hours,” nine stanzas of three lines each, including this:   “Dead in the water, the day is done There’s nothing new under the sun, Still less when it’s gone down.”   Presentism is more than a misguided focus. It is a prescription for disaster. “Without truth in history,” Conquest says in his lecture, “humanity is no longer humanity. It becomes prey to the mental distortions which have, in this century, already caused so many millions of deaths, and brought the world to the verge of ruin.”   [John Dryden died on this date, May 12, in 1700 at age sixty-eight.]

If you're familiar with Andrew Lang (1844-1912) at all, it’s likely as a collector of folk and fairy tales. I remember as a kid reading some of his twelve “Coloured” Fairy Books. He was also a prolific poet and critic, though that work is largely forgotten. He remains best known not for his original productions but as a collector of other people’s work. Here’s how Lang begins the title essay in his Adventures Among Books (1905):  “In an age of reminiscences, is there room for the confessions of a veteran, who remembers a great deal about books and very little about people?  I have often wondered that a Biographia Literaria has so seldom been attempted—a biography or autobiography of a man in his relations with other minds. Coleridge, to be sure, gave this name to a work of his, but he wandered from his apparent purpose into a world of alien disquisitions.”   That’s probably the finest almost-polite description of Coleridge’s gassiness I have ever encountered: “alien disquisitions.” He is the father of today’s critical bombast. Lang is something else – a dedicated reader whose bookish tastes started when he was a boy in Scotland. He continues:   “The following pages are frankly bookish, and to the bookish only do they appeal. The habit of reading has been praised as a virtue, and has been denounced as a vice.  In no case, if we except the perpetual study of newspapers (which cannot fairly be called reading), is the vice, or the virtue, common.  It is more innocent than opium-eating, though, like opium-eating, it unlocks to us artificial paradises. I try to say what I have found in books, what distractions from the world, what teaching (not much), and what consolations.”   Like other longtime readers, if I were ever to write an autobiography (fat chance), its scaffolding would be my reading history. That would reveal more about my nature than a recitation of schools attended and jobs held—mere externals. I enjoy the company of old-fashioned, unapologetic, non-academic bookmen like Lang. His example reminds me of John Gross’ bookish apologia in The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters (1991; rev. ed. 1991):   “Isn’t there a certain basic antagonism between the very nature of a university and the very spirit of literature? The academic mind is cautious, tightly organized, fault-finding, competitive – and above all aware of other academic minds. . . . Think of the whole idea of regarding literature as a discipline. Literature can be strenuous or difficult or deeply disturbing; it can be a hundred things – but a discipline is not one of them. Discipline means compulsion, and an interest in literature thrives on spontaneity, eager curiosity, the anticipation of pleasure; it is unlikely that a reader who comes to a book under duress, or weighed down with a sense of duty, will ever really read it at all, however much he may learn about it. Even the most intensely serious literature needs to be approached with a certain lightness of heart, if it is to yield its full intensity.”

Montaigne’s charming opening to his essay “Of the Education of Children”: “I have never seen a father who failed to claim his son, however mangy or hunchbacked he was. Not that he does not perceive his defect, unless he is utterly intoxicated by his affection; but the fact remains that the boy is his.” And I have never suggested otherwise. My youngest son David graduates today from Rice University with a B.A. in political science. In September he will enter the Peace Corps, assigned to Peru. He’s already smarter and more mature than I was at his age, and is neither mangy nor hunchbacked. As the Frenchman puts it: “There is not a child halfway through school who cannot claim to be more learned than I, who have not even the equipment to examine him on his first lesson, at least according to that lesson. And if they force me to, I am constrained, rather ineptly, to draw from it some matter of universal scope, on which I test the boy’s natural judgment: a lesson as strange to them as theirs is to me.” Montaigne speaks for autodidacts everywhere. Our educations have been spotty and self-centered, but also passionate and memorable. We love to learn. David got a more complete formal education than mine, as did his older brothers. I never went to graduate school, except for the newspapers where I worked as a reporter. David will do his graduate studies helping the people of Peru.    “Of the Education of Children” is dedicated and addressed to Madame Diane de Foix, the Comtesse de Gurson, wife of Louis de Foix, Montaigne’s friend killed in the Battle of Montraveau in 1587. The countess is pregnant as Montaigne addresses her, and he blithely assumes she is carrying a son (“you are too noble-spirited to begin otherwise than with a male”). The confidence with which he lectures her on children and their education is breathtaking. Montaigne had married in 1565 and with Françoise de la Chassaigne he had a daughter. Four other children died in infancy. He writes: “Wonderful brilliance may be gained for human judgment by getting to know men. We are all huddled and concentrated in ourselves, and our vision is reduced to the length of our nose. Socrates was asked where he was from. He replied not ‘Athens,’ but ‘The world.’ He, whose imagination was fuller and more extensive, embraced the universe as his city, and distributed his knowledge, his company, and his affections to all mankind, unlike us who look only at what is underfoot.” Throughout most of the essay, Montaigne’s advice is admirably open-minded. He urges the countess to hire an accomplished tutor and expose the boy to the best of books and people. He particularly recommends Plutarch, Seneca and Tacitus, and says “the first taste I had for books” came with reading Ovid’s Metamorphosis. Montaigne writes of himself as a young man: “Meanwhile, for all that, my mind was not lacking in strong stirrings of its own, and certain and open-minded judgments about the things it understood; and it digested them alone, without communication. And, among other things, I really do believe that it would have been wholly incapable of submitting to force and violence.” Well done, David. [The Montaigne excerpts are taken from The Complete Essays of Montaigne (trans. Donald Frame, Stanford University Press, 1957).]

“Inspiration is perhaps merely the joy of writing: it does not precede writing.” A student and aspiring fiction writer wonders why I seldom refer to “inspiration.” What is it? Do I deny its existence? Have certain writers successfully relied on it? Can he? My answer is yes and no, which betrays my background as a newspaper reporter. Telling an editor I hadn’t completed a story because I wasn’t “inspired” would be grounds, at minimum, for mockery if not dismissal. All those years of writing for a daily deadline resulted in a work ethic that now is second nature. You learn to budget your time appropriately, make telephone calls in a timely fashion and write even when the Muse is nonresponsive.   Writing can jump-start inspiration. Just plow ahead, get something on the page or screen, and you’ve created the conditions necessary for inspiration to bloom. Shortly after publishing his penultimate novel, Transparent Things (1972), Nabokov published a teasing essay titled “Inspiration” in the January 6, 1973, issue of The Saturday Review. Listen to the voice of a man who had published his first novel almost half a century earlier. He describes his experience with inspiration in detail:   “The bolt of inspiration strikes invariably: you observe the flash in this or that piece of great writing, be it a stretch of fine verse, or a passage in Joyce or Tolstoy, or a phrase in a short story, or a spurt of genius in the paper of a naturalist, of a scholar, or even in a book reviewer’s article. I have in view, naturally, not the hopeless hacks we all know—but people who are creative artists in their own right . . .”   [The sentence at the top is Jules Renard’s entry for May 9, 1898, in his Journal 1887-1910 (trans. Theo Cuffe, selected and introduced by Julian Barnes, riverrun, 2020).]

Writing is famously the most narcissistic of professions, even worse than acting or being a politician. We’re forever carrying on about ourselves and our precious insights, like the kid in class who raises his hand and goes “Ooh! Ooh!” each time the teacher asks a question. That’s the nature of what we do. Writing in some public fashion is a way of inflicting ourselves on others – “Ooh! Ooh!” - which accounts for some of the stupid, offensive things we write. We like the attention, positive or otherwise. Ironworkers and tax clerks can’t do that, at least as part of their jobs, or if they do there’s a good chance they’ll be reprimanded or canned. In a sense, you can’t fire a writer.   The late Spanish novelist Javier Marias participated in “A Symposium on the Dead” published in the Winter 2004 issue of The Threepenny Review. He writes of a friend he never met in person, a phenomenon subsequently made familiar by the internet. I’m unlikely ever to meet in person some of the people whose company I prize. For eight months in 1999, Marias carried on an epistolary friendship with Francis Haskell, the English art historian, who died of liver cancer in 2000. Haskell told Marias of his fatal disease less than a month before his death. The Spaniard refers to Haskell as “the ephemeral friend I never saw.”   Marias reminds us that most writers can’t claim to know their audience with any precision. I was always amused by newspaper editors who confidently identified our readers and told us to write specifically for them. No one has “an audience.” We have “audiences.” Marias reflects on writing to a friend he didn’t know was dying:   “Those of us who write tend to forget that among those who read there is great variety, and that behind each reader there is a personal history that carries on after the rapid perusal of our insubstantial columns, and that many of these histories are dominated by despair or grief.”   What impact would such knowledge have on the way we write? Probably little or none. I’ve written things that have been needlessly hurtful or dismissive. There’s plenty out there that needs to be hurt or dismissed. I’m not recommending trigger warnings or self-censorship. Just pick your targets carefully. There’s nothing wrong with hurting those who deserve it. Marias says of the last letter he received from Haskell: “It was not easy to reply to it: one fears in such cases that one’s every word might wound the one who reads.”   [The Marias essay was translated from the Spanish by Eric Southworth.]