I’ve learned with time that my mind has periods of attentiveness followed by drifts into passive, relaxed states of consciousness. I’m awake but almost empty. I might be taking a shower or staring out the window at nothing. That’s when I occasionally find myself in an old song or childhood memory or, more mysteriously, inhabiting a character from fiction, taking on his values. When I become conscious of this channeling, it disappears leaving a faint, lingering impression, like the afterimages left by bright lights.  Recently I found myself in Austin King, the Illinois lawyer, father and put-upon husband at the center of William Maxwell’s 1948 novel, Time Will Darken It. It’s the opening scene. King is in his bedroom getting dressed for a party for relatives visiting from Mississippi. His wife, pregnant with their second child, is not speaking to him. She resents the party and the presence of outsiders.   I wasn’t recalling the words but the setting, emotional and physical, which I had abstracted from the text. I’ve read Maxwell’s novel three or four times, starting in the late seventies. I know it well. Unintentionally, I had projected myself into King because his emotional state was familiar – conflicted, guilty, wanting to satisfy contradictory wishes and please everyone. I didn’t have to go looking for it. I carry it as a latent memory.   There’s a semi-popular theory floating around out there that we read fiction to boost our empathy quotient. In short, we read to learn to be better human beings, to feel the pain of others. That’s silly but also kind of obnoxious. How self-centered. Willa Cather would have snorted. My flashing onto the bedroom of Austin and Martha King lasted seconds. I enjoyed the sensation but made no effort to hang on to it. It was a fairly primitive mental event, not freighted with philosophical baggage. A handful of other fiction writers have done this for me, all in my private pantheon – Chekhov, James, Proust, among others. Part of the reason I value them is that they leave these phantom scenes in my subconscious mind, through no effort of my own.   Time Will Darken It, along with So Long, See You Tomorrow (1980), is Maxwell’s finest novel.  In 1955, Maxwell delivered a speech at Smith College, “The Writer as Illusionist” (collected in the 2024 volume of the same title, published by Godine). He likens a novelist to a dog who dreams of chasing a rabbit. He writes:   “The novelist’s rabbit is the truth—about life, about human character, about himself and therefore by extensionh, it is to be hoped, about other people. He is convinced that this is all knowable, can be described, can be recorded, by a person sufficiently dedicated to describing and recording, can be caught is a net of narration. . . . . But what, seriously, was accomplished by these writers [Maxwell has just mentioned Turgenev, Lawrence, Woolf and Forster] or can the abstract dummy novelist I have been describing hope to accomplish? Not life, of course; not the real thing; not children and roses; but only a facsimile that is called literature.”     The finest writers of fiction, those we treasure most highly, work simultaneously in two mediums – words and human beings. William Maxwell died twenty-five years ago today, on July 31, 2ooo, at age ninety-one.

“[T]here is a very widespread and comfortable belief that we are all of us born writers. Not long ago I heard that agile and mellifluous quodlibetarian, Dr. Joad, saying in answer to a questioner who wanted to write good letters, that anybody could write good letters: one had but to think out clearly what one wanted to say, and then set it down in the simplest terms.”  Even that is a challenge for some. Clarity in writing, of course, reflects clarity of thought. Muddled prose suggests muddled thinking. It also helps to have some sense of style. “Dr. Joad” is C.E.M. Joad, not a member of the Okie family in The Grapes of Wrath but a one-time English radio philosopher and celebrity. The author is Max Beerbohm in a lecture he delivered in 1943 on the odious writer and human being Lytton Strachey, whom he knew and about whom he has reservations. Here, Beerbohm continues on the subject of Joad and facile writing:   “And a few weeks later, when the writing of books was under discussion, he said that the writers who thought most about how they should write were the hardest to read; and again he seemed to think lucidity all-sufficing.”   What grabbed my attention was that exotic word quodlibetarian. As usual, Dr. Johnson in his Dictionary is plain and concise: “One who talks or disputes on any subject.” We know the type. The OED’s definition requires further explanation: “A person who discusses or engages in quodlibets; a writer of quodlibets.” That word is obsolete and dates from the fifteenth century in English: “An academic exercise within a university in which a master or bachelor would discuss questions on any subject; the written record of such an exercise.” In short, a know-it-all, in fact or by self-proclamation, and a species never endangered.   Beerbohm’s own prose in the Strachey lecture is splendid. Take this passage, which out-Joads Joad and out-Stracheys Strachey:   “It takes all kinds to make a world, or even to make a national literature. Even for spirits less fastidious than Strachey’s, there is, even at the best of times, a great charm in the past. Time, that sedulous artist, has been at work on it, electing and rejecting with great tact. The past is a work of art, free from irrelevancies and loose ends. There are, for our vision, comparatively few people in it, and all of them are interesting people. The dullards have all disappeared—all but those whose dullness was so pronounced as to be in itself for us an amusing virtue. And in the past there is so blessedly nothing for us to worry about. Everything is settled. There’s nothing to be done about it—nothing but to contemplate it and blandly form theories about this or that aspect of it.”

Montaigne’s Travel Journal recounts his wanderings through Germany, Switzerland and Italy between June 1580 and November 1581. He sought relief from the pain of kidney stones and visited numerous spas with mineral baths. As always, Montaigne is curious about everything – not just the art and architecture of the ancient world but such seemingly mundane things as food, lodgings, local customs and manners, the cost of everything. Culture in the broadest sense interested him. He was a man of the world, not a "sensitive plant" in the later Romantic sense, and served as mayor of Bordeaux. Here is his account of the execution he witnessed in Rome on January 14, 1581:  “On this same day I saw two brothers executed, former servants of the Castellano’s secretary, who had killed him a few days before in the city by night, in the very palace of the said Signor Giacomo Buoncompagno, the Pope’s son. They tore them with red-hot pincers, then cut off their fist in front of the said palace, and having cut it off they put on the wound capons that they had killed and immediately opened up. They were executed on a scaffold: first they were clubbed with a big wooden mace, and then their throats were cut immediately. This is a punishment they say is sometimes used in Rome, though others maintained that it had been adapted to the misdeed, since they had killed their master in that way.”   The reader is struck by the cool thoroughness of Montaigne’s account. He writes more like a modern journalist than a self-conscious artiste. In his 1965 essay titled “Mr. Montaigne’s Journey to Italy,” the Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert writes:   “How to explain the fact that the only remarks on art in Montaigne’s travel journal are so meager and uninteresting? It seems unjust and simplistic to explain it by a lack of aesthetic sensibility. We should rather draw the conclusion that for people of the Renaissance, a work of art was a much more natural thing than it is for us; there was no need to set it apart from the surrounding reality and bury it in a museum.”   Herbert visited Western Europe for the first time in 1958-59: France, then England, Italy, France again and back to Poland. His budget was tight but Herbert was no hedonistic tourist. Nor was he a stuffy academic or critic. The resulting essays in Barbarian in the Garden (1962; trans. Michael March and Jarosław Anders, 1985) chronicle a self-guided tour of Western culture by a man temporarily liberated from the bleak, vulgar constraints of Soviet-era Poland. Unlike Montaigne, Herbert revels in the inherited art and architecture of Europe. In the Barbarian essay “Orvieto’s Duomo,” the poet recounts his visit to the fourteenth-century cathedral in that Umbrian city:   “The muses were not silent though the times were by no means peaceful. The town was a hotbed of heresy; and through historical irony and thanks to thick walls, the frequent refuge of popes. The Guelph clan of the Monaldeschi fought against its Ghibbelline faction, who were expelled from the town while the sculptors were illustrating Genesis. According to the reliable witness, the author of The Divine Comedy, both families suffer in purgatory along with the kin of Romeo and Juliet. They were prolonged contests for power within the town – in Dante’s words the fate of dolore ostello, ‘the inn of suffering.’” Barbarian in the Garden may be my favorite collection of essays written by anyone, second only to Montaigne’s. It’s a poet’s book but never descends into the merely “poetic.” Herbert’s excitement and gratitude for finally being able to visit the primal sites of his culture – Western culture – are palpable. He echoes a passage in  Montaigne’s essay “Of Vanity”: “This greedy appetite for new and unknown things indeed helps to foster in me the desire to travel, but enough other circumstances contribute to it. I gladly turn aside from governing my house.”   The only essay in Barbarian in the Garden Herbert devotes to a single artist is “Piero della Francesca.” If you savor symbolism, consider that Piero died on the first Columbus Day – October 12, 1492. Herbert judges him virtually a saint of humanism. Here’s the conclusion of his essay: “Tradition holds that he went blind towards the end of his life. Marco di Longara told Berto degli Alberti that as a young boy he walked the streets of Borgo San Sepolcro with an old, blind painter called Piero della Francesca.   “Little Marco could not have known that his hand was leading light.”   Herbert begins “Lascaux” with a spirited, unexpected digression: “Breakfast in a small restaurant, but what a breakfast! An omelette with truffles. Truffles belong to the world history of human folly, hence to the history of art. So a word about truffles.” This is a man temporarily freed from the grim, gray strictures of the Soviet Bloc. He devotes the next two paragraphs to an entertaining account of truffle history and gastronomy. On to the caves at Lascaux, with Herbert’s wit as our guide:   “The cold, electric light is hideous, so we can only imagine the Lascaux cave when the living light of torches and crests set into motion the herds of bulls, bison and deer on the walls and vault. In addition, the guide’s voice stammering explanations. A sergeant reading the Holy Scriptures.”   Herbert revels in the continuity of human accomplishment, the living tradition of our cave-dwelling forbears, Montaigne and a twentieth-century Polish poet. Let’s all give thanks with him. Herbert died on this date, July 28, in 1998, at age seventy-three.   [All passages from Montaigne are taken from The Complete Works: Essays, Travel Journal, Letters (trans. Donald Frame, Everyman’s Library, 2003). The first passage from Herbert is drawn from The Collected Prose: 1948-1998 (trans. Alissa Valles, Ecco, 2010).]

An American children’s book published in 1908 reminded me of a metaphysical figment conjured by Jean-Paul Sartre. The book is The Hole Book, written and illustrated by Peter Newell. A friend who collects vintage children’s books told me about it. The verse is serviceable doggerel, rhythmically regular enough to be memorized and recited by kids. The premise is simple and clever and the book would never be published today. Here are the opening verses:  “Tom Potts was fooling with a gun (Such follies should not be), When—bang! the pesky thing went off Most unexpectedly!   “Tom didn’t know ’twas loaded, and It scared him ’most to death— He tumbled flat upon the floor And fairly gasped for breath.   “The bullet smashed a fine French clock (The clock had just struck three), Then made a hole clean through the wall, As you can plainly see.”   We follow the path of the bullet through the remainder of the book as it passes through a boiler, a rope holding a swing, an aquarium, a Dutchman’s pipe, a sack of grain and a watermelon, among other things. Not a soul is wounded by the stray bullet. Newell is no poet but he’s a marvelous illustrator. My sons would have loved this book.   The professor who taught the eighteenth-century English novel and introduced me to Smollett and Sterne had a sense of humor that once would have been described as “bawdy.” She was enormously funny and insisted that literature is written to be enjoyed. It’s a lesson that has stuck with me for more than half a century. Something that came up in class reminded Donna of Sartre’s concept of “the hole.” She giggled through her brief explanation drawn from To Freedom Condemned: A Guide to His Philosophy (trans. Justus Streller, 1960):   “The hole is something which longs to be filled. The small child is drawn as if by magic to holes. He can not restrain himself from putting in his finger or his whole arm. He makes a symbolic sacrifice of his body to cause the void to disappear and a plenitude of being to exist. The fundamental tendency of human beings to stop up holes persists throughout life, symbolically and in reality,” and so forth in unapologetically Gallic silliness.