News of certain public deaths remains rooted in memory to an indelible time and place. Famously, millions of mundane lives intersected forever with the assassination of President Kennedy, which people recall in vivid detail more than sixty years later their reactions at that moment. While working on the city desks of several newspapers I learned that Glenn Gould, R. Buckminster Fuller, Sam Peckinpah and Zoot Sims had died. The news was carried by the wire. On a humid evening in Youngstown, Ohio, while riding around the city, I learned from the radio the unlikely news that Vladimir Nabokov had died--one of those deaths that leaves you numb and unbelieving. It was July 2, 1977, and the Russian-born American novelist was seventy-eight. I had been reading him for a decade and the notion that he might someday die had never occurred to me. Nabokov writes in Speak, Memory:   “Whenever in my dreams I see the dead, they always appear silent, bothered, strangely depressed, quite unlike their dear, bright selves. I am aware of them, without any astonishment, in surroundings they never visited during their earthly existence, in the house of some friend of mine they never knew. They sit apart, frowning at the floor, as if death were a dark taint, a shameful family secret. It is certainly not then--not in dreams--but when one is wide awake, at moments of robust joy and achievement, on the highest terrace of consciousness, that mortality has a chance to peer beyond its own limits, from the mast, from the past and its castle tower. And although nothing much can be seen through the mist, there is somehow the blissful feeling that one is looking in the right direction.”   I feel fortunate that my life overlapped with Nabokov’s, that I read his work early while his Russian books were being translated into English, that they took up residence in my imagination and that I return to his books regularly, with certainty of delight. I often measure other writers against the excellence of his achievement. His example confirms that themes of mortal significance in fiction can be composed in prose that John Updike once described as “ecstatic.” I’ve just finished rereading The Defense (1930; trans. by the author and Michael Scammell, 1964), where the imagery of vision and mist recur yet again:   “Any future is unknown–but sometimes it acquires a particular fogginess, as if some other force had come to the aid of destiny's natural reticence and distributed this resilient fog, from which thought rebounds.”

On July 2, 1944, the Polish poet and fiction writer Tadeusz Borowski begins a letter to his mother written while he was a prisoner in Auschwitz:  “What’s of greatest interest first: the eggs are amazingly fresh and very much desired, the butter is wonderful, straight from the cow. And the cheese as well.”   Borowski was not Jewish but a veteran of twentieth-century barbarism. He was born in 1922 in the Soviet Ukraine to Polish parents. His father was shipped to Siberia in 1926 to work on the infamous White Sea Canal. When he was eight, his mother was sent to a settlement on the Yenisei River, also in Siberia. Borowski was cared for by an aunt. In 1932, the Polish Red Cross arranged for the family to be reunited and sent to Warsaw in exchange for Communist prisoners. Borowski attended a school run by Franciscan monks and, after the start of the Nazi occupation, a clandestine underground school. That’s when he started writing. Among his earliest work was a translation of the fool’s songs in Twelfth Night. He published his first collection of poems in an edition of 165. In 1943, at age twenty-one, Borowski was arrested by the Gestapo and sent to Auschwitz.   Later in the letter to his mother, he writes: “I, myself, am, of course, well and cheerful, a normal person who accepts the present as though it were already the past, who is full of hope and not without a future.” He adds: “Will we ever be so young again? Life truly is short. And is art truly long?”   In late 1944, Borowski was transferred from Auschwitz to the Dautmergen sub-camp of Natzweiler-Struthof in Germany, and finally to Dachau. He was among the prisoners liberated by American troops on May 1, 1945. The number tattooed on his arm was 119198.   After the war, Borowski began writing prose fiction. A collection of his stories was translated into English and published by Viking in 1967. Philip Roth later included that volume, This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen (trans. Barbara Vedder), in a series he edited for Penguin, Writers from the Other Europe, alongside titles by Milan Kundera, Danilo Kis, Bruno Schulz and others. That slender 1980 paperback still sits on my shelf though brown, brittle and a bit ragged. I remember reading those stories as though they were a sacred text. I had never read anything so grim. A warning: events recounted in his stories are shockingly violent. Atrocities are performed casually by German guards and kapos among the prisoners, and Borowski narrates them in a voice almost clinical. There’s no melodrama.   Finally, in 2021, Yale University Press published a more complete edition, Here in Our Auschwitz and Other Stories (trans. Madeline G. Levine), with a foreword by Timothy Snyder, author of Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (2010). The earlier collection’s title story is here translated as “Ladies and Gentlemen, Welcome to the Gas.” Its narrator works on the ramp beside the railroad tracks in a concentration camp (as Borowski did), unloading the train cars filled with prisoners. He pulls back from the scene and describes the larger context. In effect, he tries to make sense of the Holocaust and suggests it may continue without end:    “The transports grow into weeks, months, years. When the war ends, they will count up the incinerated. They will calculate a total of four and a half million. The bloodiest battle of the war, the greatest victory of united and unanimous Germany. Ein Reich, ein Volk,  ein Führer – and four crematoriums. . . . The Jews will burn, the Poles will burn, the Russians will burn . . . . The gas chambers will be improved, made more efficient, will be more cunningly disguised.”   Later, Borowski turned to journalism and joined Poland’s Communist Party. His collected works, published in Poland in 1954, totaled five volumes. His letters reveal Borowski’s tortured disillusionment with the Stalinists. In West Berlin, he had acquired a copy of The God That Failed. In 1951, age twenty-eight, he asphyxiated himself with gas from a stove.   [The letter is collected in Postal Indiscretions: The Correspondence of Tadeusz Borowski (trans. Alicia Nitecki, Northwestern University Press, 2007).]

In my family we can’t get away from the “Y” chromosome. Having children is known as “going to the Y.” I have three sons, no daughters, and my brother, who died last summer, was my sole sibling. My mother had five brothers, no sisters. My father, two brothers, no sisters, etc. Little girls and by extension, women, remain mysteries to me, even more so than they are to most men. I envy my friends with daughters, though I’m not complaining. My sons are healthy, smart, seldom boring, often funny and have never been arrested.  Today is Michael’s twenty-fifth birthday. He is my middle son, a first lieutenant in the Marine Corps, a cyber officer stationed at Fort Meade, Maryland. He is a walking balance of left and right brain. His interests include mathematics, etymology, history, rock climbing and literature. We can keep up with most of each other’s conversations. About Michael I have few worries and no regrets. Talking with other parents, I know how fortunate I am.   Dr. Johnson had no children of his own but was devoted to his stepdaughter, Lucy Porter, the daughter of Johnson’s wife, Elizabeth Jervis Porter Johnson (1689-1752), known as Tetty. Lucy was born in 1715, six years after Johnson, lived in Lichfield with his mother and served in her shop. She died in 1786, two years after her stepfather. Johnson had always assumed a fond, fatherly role with Lucy, who became one of his most frequent correspondents. For this most stoical of men, the death of loved ones was always shattering. In his 1974 biography of Johnson, John Wain notes his emotional state after his mother’s death in January 1759:   “His letters to Lucy Porter are pitiful; he leans on her, begs for her help and comfort, asks that she shall stay on in the house and let the little business go on as it can, and is content to leave all the details to her and take her word for everything. ‘You will forgive me if I am not yet so composed as to give any directions about anything. But you are wiser and better than I and I shall be pleased with all that you shall do.’”   Lucy was his close contemporary, a mature woman, which is not the same as raising a child from birth. The love is real but less blood-deep. Johnson suggests this in his Rambler essay from November 13, 1750:   "It may be doubted, whether the pleasure of seeing children ripening into strength be not overbalanced by the pain of seeing some fall in the blossom, and others blasted in their growth; some shaken down by storms, some tainted with cankers, and some shriveled in the shade; and whether he that extends his care beyond himself does not multiply his anxieties more than his pleasures, and weary himself to no purpose, by superintending what he cannot regulate."   Johnsonson intuitively understood a parent’s vulnerabilities and limits. Michael has never fallen, been blasted, shaken, tainted or shriveled. Still, one worries, quietly.

A pun is best delivered without announcing itself as a pun. Those ungifted at wordplay tend to underline, boldface and italicize their every attempt at a pun, most of which are already feeble. Thus, the pun’s bad reputation and the ensuing groans. In contrast I love a good, subtle, almost anonymous pun, which ought to detonate like a boobie-trap. The resulting intellectual burst of recognition is pure satisfaction. English is amenable to punning because our language is forever gravid, draws from so many sources and tends to be overrun with synonyms and homonyms. The OED defines pun precisely and without a nod to the comic:  “The use of a word in such a way as to suggest two or more meanings or different associations, or of two or more words of the same or nearly the same sound with different meanings, so as to produce a humorous effect; a play on words.”   But of a specific kind. Charles Lamb tended to take a shotgun approach to punning, assuming at least one of the pellets will hit its target. Take this passage he wrote in a letter replying to one from his friend John Bates Dibdin on June 30, 1826:   “Am I to answer all this? why ’tis as long as those to the Ephesians and Galatians put together—I have counted the words for curiosity. But then Paul has nothing like the fun which is ebullient all over yours. I don’t remember a good thing (good like yours) from the 1st Romans to the last of the Hebrews. I remember but one Pun in all the Evangely, and that was made by his and our master: Thou art Peter (that is Doctor Rock) and upon this rock will I build &c.; which sanctifies Punning with me against all gainsayers. I never knew an enemy to puns, who was not an ill-natured man.”   Lamb’s bilingual pun is based on Matthew 16:18: “And I say also unto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.” It was a favorite of another master-pungent, James Joyce.

Good hearts try to talk us out of phobias. After all, people are naïve about the powers of rationalism: “Explain it, and it goes away.” As a kid I fell for that, almost literally, when I tried to muscle my way with sheer will power past the Terminal Tower in downtown Cleveland, formerly the second-tallest building in North America. It was the only time in my life when I fainted -- only briefly, but a friend caught me and pushed me into a doorway. With age I’ve added to tall buildings a cluster of new but related irrational fears – large open spaces (indoors or out), being a passenger in a speeding vehicle, escalators. All have in common a spatial component, the feeling of a free-form fall into space. I have a recurrent dream of being suspended upside-down by a rope hanging from a horizontal flagpole at the top of a skyscraper. Jonathan Swift had similar terrors and scholars have retrospectively diagnosed him with Meniere's disease.  No doubt talk therapy and/or pharmaceuticals could ease the distress, but it’s a little late for that. Besides, I’ve crafted a lifetime of avoiding certain situations and venues. I just don’t go there anymore and the loss is minimal. Perhaps this is why I feel safe and confident with words – no danger of dropping into the abyss, metaphysical or otherwise.   A.E. Stallings has a poem, “Fear of Happiness” (This Afterlife: Selected Poems, 2022), that nicely diagnoses my condition:   “Looking back, it’s something I’ve always had: As a kid, it was a glass-floored elevator I crouched at the bottom of, my eyes squinched tight, Or staircase whose gaps I was afraid I’d slip through, Though someone always said I’d be all right— Just don’t look down or See, it’s not so bad (The nothing rising underfoot). Then later The high-dive at the pool, the tree-house perch, Ferris wheels, balconies, cliffs, a penthouse view, The merest thought of airplanes. You can call It a fear of heights, a horror of the deep; But it isn’t the unfathomable fall That makes me giddy, makes my stomach lurch, It’s that the ledge itself invents the leap.”   I can imagine simply standing by an open window in one of those obscenely tall buildings in Dubai and I get shaky. Hold it, and I sweat. The power of imagination.