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.”

Another request for a reading list from a young reader. Any reply will be incomplete and risk discouraging aspiring literati. The only infallible inducement to literature is personal pleasure, a notoriously subjective criterion. I love Gibbon and Doughty, and you may find them appallingly tedious. I favor the time-tested and rely on books carrying the seal of approval from generations of readers, and your interests may be strictly contemporary. It’s not dismissive to tell a young reader: jump in anywhere. Like Borges, I assume that one book is potentially all books. That is, gamble a little, select a book that sounds interesting and see where it leads. There’s no shame in closing a book if it disappoints.  In 1909, the English novelist Arnold Bennett published Literary Taste: How to Form It, a sort of self-help guide to English literature. Bennett includes a list of several hundred recommended books, arranged chronologically and giving their prices as of 1909. This is not a snob’s list (though it includes Gibbon and Doughty), and at least a third of the books I have never read. Bennett’s opening sentences:   “At the beginning a misconception must be removed from the path. Many people, if not most, look on literary taste as an elegant accomplishment, by acquiring which they will complete themselves, and make themselves finally fit as members of a correct society. . . . This attitude, or any attitude which resembles it, is wrong. To him who really comprehends what literature is, and what the function of literature is, this attitude is simply ludicrous. It is also fatal to the formation of literary taste.”   Neither Bennett nor I wish to impose a “canon” on anyone. We merely know some of the books that have given us pleasure and perhaps taught us something. We’re small-d democrats. We’re not here to lecture, especially to young readers. Bennett is honest about the potential audience for reading the best books:   "A classic is a work which gives pleasure to the minority which is intensely and permanently interested in literature. It lives on because the minority, eager to renew the sensation of pleasure, is eternally curious and is therefore engaged in an eternal process of rediscovery. A classic does not survive for any ethical reason. It does not survive because it conforms to certain canons, or because neglect would not kill it. It survives because it is a source of pleasure, and because the passionate few can no more neglect it than a bee can neglect a flower. The passionate few do not read ‘the right things’ because they are right.”   So much for fashion.

A reader asks what I hope to accomplish in retirement. I’m not one for making grand plans or resolutions. No golf and little travel. It’s more likely I’ll continue what I’m already doing – writing, reading, family matters – just more of it. More Montaigne, J.V. Cunningham, Shakespeare, Rebecca West. Luke O’Sullivan writes in his introduction to Michael Oakeshott’s Notebooks, 1922-86 (2014):  “What [Montaigne] had to offer, he believed, was not a consistent set of arguments with which to answer problems of the human condition, but (like Aristotle) a feeling for balance and an ability to live without the need for certainty. Moreover, he had a sense of his own integrity; late in life, Oakeshott made a note of Montaigne’s remark that ‘The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself.’”   The Montaigne quote is from the essay “Of Solitude,” written around 1572, and it seems applicable to late-life retirement. The previous year Montaigne had retired from public life to the Château de Montaigne. In its tower he kept his books and found the privacy he needed to write his essays. Like Montaigne, I’m no hermit but I need quiet and a moderate amount of solitude to get done what I want to do. I understand some retirees get bored and start drinking and preparing themselves for a premature death. They have never learned “how to belong to oneself.” In his Notebooks, Oakeshott writes:   “We spend our lives trying to discover how to live, a perfect way of life, sens de la vie. But we shall never find it. Life is the search for it; the successful life is that which is given up to this search; & when we think we have found it, we are farthest from it. Delude ourselves that we have found it, persuade ourselves that here at least there is a point at which we can rest – and life has become at once moribund. Just as to remain in love we must be continually falling in love, so to remain living we must be continually striving to live.”   Montaigne echoes Oakeshott in his essay “Of Physiognomy” (c. 1585-88):   “[D]eath is indeed the end, but not therefore the goal, of life; it is its finish, its extremity, but not therefore its object. Life should be an end unto itself, a purpose unto itself; its rightful study is to regulate, conduct, and suffer itself. Among the many other duties comprised in this general and principal chapter on knowing how to live is this article on knowing how to die; and it is one of the lightest, if our fear did not give it weight.”