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.

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.

Some years ago I happened on an account of Abraham Lincoln’s assassination that read like a coroner’s report. The author described in minute medical detail what happened after John Wilkes Booth pulled the trigger – the blood, bone fragments, tissue damage in the president’s brain. I had known since I was a kid the events leading to his death that night in Ford’s Theater, but this second-by-second forensic narrative still shocked me. I felt I was learning of the murder for the first time, as though my earlier knowledge were little more than a sketchy impression, a rumor.  Robert D. Kaplan is a rare writer who makes international relations and geopolitics interesting. He writes tight, intelligent prose that is never gassy or dull. His approach to world affairs is shrewd, unapologetically pessimistic and carefully documented but at the same time literary. The first chapter of his latest book, Waste Land: A World in Permanent Crisis (Random House, 2025), is devoted to the doomed Weimar Republic, and Kaplan begins with a look at two novels – Goodbye to Berlin by Christopher Isherwood (1939) and Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929). As his thesis develops, he adopts various literary figures as guides, scaffolding to structure his story, including Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Much of the material is familiar to me but when he describes, in a single paragraph, the murder of the czar and his family by the Bolsheviks early on the morning of July 17, 1918, I felt as though I were encountering those events for the first time:   “The seminal crime of the 20th century, which given the various regimes to come in Russia, carried over with its second- and third-order effects into the 21st century, was the murder of Nocholas II’s family, including all the children, in July 1918 in Ekaterinburg, probably ordered by Lenin himself. If you could deliberately kill children at point-blank range with guns and bayonets, well then, you could kill millions.”   Dead were Czar Nicholas II, his wife Alexandra Feodorovna and their five children: Olga, 22; Tatiana, 21; Maria, 19; Anastasia, 17; and Alexei, 13. Murdered with them were court physician Eugene Botkin, lady-in-waiting Anna Demidova, footman Alexei Trupp and chief cook Ivan Kharitonov. The bodies were transported to the Koptyaki forest, stripped of their clothing, mutilated with grenades and acid to prevent identification, and buried.   Kaplan is no sentimental defender of the czar and his dynasty. “Czar Nicholas II,” he writes, “was stupid, indecisive, and self-destructive. He had no judgment. But as much as Nicholas retreated into a reactionary past—even as Russian society was experiencing the painful birth pangs of modernization—there could simply be no Russia without the monarchy. Alas, Nicholas was understandably hated as much as his family was necessary: this is the signal tragedy that Solzhenitsyn captures in these novels.”   The slaughter of the Romanovs was “seminal” because as a group and often as individuals, the Bolsheviks were and are serial killers, even of children. The roll call: Holodomor, Great Purge and millions of others dead, most of them anonymous, many of them children, and the killing goes on.    [Watch a video of Anatol Shmelev, the Robert Conquest Curator for Russia, Ukraine, and Eurasia at the Hoover Institution Library and Archives, recounting the murder of the Romanovs.]

I grew up fetishizing a university education. I knew no one in my family or in my working-class neighborhood who had “gone to college,” as the common phrase had it. In my experience, that status was confined to doctors and teachers. My father was a high-school dropout. Higher education seemed like a gift reserved for the anointed, whether by wealth or genius. Naturally this inspired a strain of suspicion and resentment. After high school, I applied, without assistance, to two universities – Harvard and Bowling Green State University in Ohio. My naiveté was stunning. The state school accepted me and after three years I dropped out. It was probably my generation that first came to believe everyone should go to college. I no longer think that’s the case, especially because a university degree no longer signifies a true education. I’ve known too many degree-holding alliterates and even border-line illiterates. Robert Conquest chooses his words carefully in Reflections on a Ravaged Century (1999): “Not all young, or old, people are susceptible to education.” Conquest’s analysis of education is interesting. His formal education at Oxford was excellent and he became a gifted historian, poet, novelist and all-around man of letters – a rare breed today. He bolsters his argument with allusions to Edward Gibbon and Marcus Aurelius. Some young people are, Conquest writes, “more or less uneducable. Others have had a good education by the time they are eighteen, or even younger, but have neither the desire nor the bent for ‘higher’ education.” This confirms my observation that some of the brightest, most well-read people I’ve known are degreeless. “For people can be educated, cultured and so forth without having been to university at all," Conquest writes, "as with dozens from Benjamin Franklin to Winston Churchill, from Shakespeare to Einstein, to say nothing of the great women writers of the nineteenth century. Nor is this only a matter of genius. Even erudition is possible outside academe, a point illustrated perfectly by Gibbon himself, the greatest of historians, who did indeed attend Oxford briefly when fifteen years old, from which (as he tells us) he got nothing. What all of them had was, in the first place, reading. We all know dozens of people, especially from an older generation, who are as much at home in these worlds -- except in special fields—as their Bachelored and Mastered and Doctored acquaintances.” It’s always a pleasure to meet and talk with an autodidact, a self-directed learner, as opposed to a formally educated pedant or drone. Often the former is motivated by love of learning; the latter by status, money, fashion, indifference. Of the amateur class, Conquest writes: “No doubt these were naturally inclined that way, or else brought up in circumstances where it was taken for granted. And, of course, they must have had some sort of preuniversity education that puts them above many university entrants, or exiters, these days. I think of such people (at random) as Julian Symons, or Roy Fuller, or V S. Pritchett, or Iain Hamilton, the editor of the London Spectator (who left school at sixteen to work in a clothes shop), and of other major figures in literature and journalism.”