What have we done? Villon. ¶There’s Demosthenes polishing his teeth with stones. Quintilian. Cicero. ¶O we’ve had speakers of such spectacular speechifying power Gods word is but a cough before a sneeze beside them. Who, if not Hitler, like a wind through wheat, made the heads of the masses dance as though their hats held feet? Isocrates. Calhoun. ¶I am the thimble of History, Mad Meg said. I drive the needle in. ¶What did the Muses want of you when they offered that olive-fruiting stick? compliments in front of every song and flattery following. Ah, they make me sick. Simonides. Theopompus—not the nicest—and the names of fairies, tarts, and sister-suckers, people of paper, paper people, Acton, Lecky, Maitland, Froude, Jewboys, jack-offs, niggerlovers, Thoreau, Twain, men of means and men of parts, Marcus Aurelius, Chesterfield, King James, whom have you Muses so lightly laureled? verbal farts and fiddle-scrapers, every kind of diligent compiler, pipsqueak, nail-biter, fact-fucker, dissolute tutor, bombathlete, hairy bluenose, cheat and bore . . . let me think my way along this wall . . . Clarendon, Longinus . . . cutaways, cutesies, castoffs, creampuffs, chokethroats, alley cats, cowards, turncoats. hounds from hell, boys from Harvard, kids from Yale, and other godsends (as they say they are and pray to be), saints, archangels, showoffs, sycophants, suicides, and some like me: desperate failures, resentful assassins . . . yet here—as nowhere—even one’s enemies are friends, even one’s superiors are unenvied. Dreiser. Dumas. Dilthey. Hart Crane. Rimbaud. Ronsard. Is there a richness anywhere to match this? ¶O yes, O yes, O yes, O yes, I am aware, O how I know, that there are those who write like tenors, stock their books as though each were a fish pond, dry goods, hardware, or a pantry; who jerry-build, compose sentences like tangled spaghetti, piss through their pens and otherwise relieve themselves, play at poetry as if they were still dressing dolls, order history as though it were an endless bill of lading; but there were genuine bookmen once: Burton, Montaigne, Rabelais and other list-makers, Sir Thomas Browne and Hobbes, in the days when a book was not just a signal like a whiff of smoke from a movie Indian or a carton of cold crumb-covered carryout chicken, but a blood-filled body in the world, a mind in motion like a cannonball. Spinoza sent our freedom flying through just such a trajectory. Kant rearranged our thoughts forever. Calvin did us in. ¶How many volumes of Magus Tabor? Ten of Wordsworth bound in blue, gray, and gold. Twenty-five of Parkman. Lermontov: two. When I complained to Tabor that my contemporaries were mostly contraptionists, he grinned. Never mind, my boy; a book is a holy vessel—ah, indeed, yes, it will transmogrify a turd. Nordau. Gentile. Husserl. Hartmann. Bentham. James and John Stuart Mill. And of Goethe, Schiller, Fichte, Schelling—how many? Outside I hear the power mowers mow the snow. Of Herder, Heidegger, Heine, Helmholtz, Spengler, Werfel, Weber? Open any. Karl Jaspers. Ernst Jünger. A crack like a chasm.