Tomorrow when I go and walk on the field where the culmination of Wolfe’s life and death transpired, the plains will be hemmed in by modern Quebec City. Last night, hungry after an afternoon of wandering around, I walked the lower town’s alleys and found them lined with little shops and galleries, and strung with fairy lights. It is late in the tourist season but couples walked the cobblestones craning their necks at this and that, their satchels and purses bouncing off their hips. I ate a hot little vegetarian pizza at ten o’clock on the terrasse of a gastropub at the bottom of the steep rise to upper town and heard a lot of English, though I’d expected to encounter mostly French. Tonight the moon, still nearly full, hangs like a festive lantern above the town.

I phoned home yesterday after checking into the hotel and my cat-sitter was watching a movie about time travel. He said the film made it seem as if we already possess, or almost possess, the means to travel back in time. It was that skillfully done. Later, sitting with my artichoke pizza that had a delicious charred crust and thinking about the Wolfe you and I have both come to know, the Wolfe who died in this same place two and a half centuries past, I thought, yes, we do possess the means. Through the letters of Wolfe, not via memory, as you seem to have experienced, but through a kind of listening through time—I’ve heard him. I know I have. Not in the way you’ve heard him, of course, after the desert, after your own war. But still, through reaching with all my inquiry into his words, I’ve met him, or I’ve met…perhaps through my having met you, Jimmy…his warm presence.

This morning I walked from Hôtel Le Priori toward the Plains of Abraham. I scaled the winding hill around the funicular, walked past the Chateau Frontenac with its extravagant architectural peaks and cornices, and came upon a monument thrust straight into the sky: on its side stretches the name WOLFE, facing upriver toward the plains and the colony. I thought: was it deliberately made in the ugliest possible British style, phallic and unadorned, without a swirl or any French curve at all? Then I looked at the other side, down which stretched the word MONTCALM.

I sidled up to eavesdrop on a couple standing with their private tour guide. “This monument,” said the guide, “is the only one in the world dedicated to two warring generals.”

Each general’s name occupied an opposing plane of the white shaft, sharing one pillar but never able to see each other, each facing resolutely away. Even an onlooker could in no way see both names from a single vantage point.