Vega. Natsume. Quevedo. The creaking door in a horror story. Gorki. Heliodorus, Apollinaire: the most beautiful names of all. Every cover lifts as though it lay above a cellar stairway, hid a hold. A hold. There’s the one in Conrad’s Typhoon, full of Chinamen and their money flung about in the darkness by the storm. Our cellar doors are warped and difficult to lift. Rain leaks in, leaves collect, insects prosper, mold forms. Do descend: come in, the witch says, smiling with her slit. Do. D’Annunzio. Chamberlain. Carco. Krafft-Ebing. Huysmans. Sacher-Masoch. De Sade. All the dirty old gentlemen and their Victorian foreskins. I could not in my life remember so many of my friends. Southwell, for example. Shelley. Donne.

In eaves sole sparowe sitts not more alone,

Nor mourning pelican in desert wilde,

Than Sely I, that solitary mone,

From highest hopes to hardest happ exild;

Sometyme, O blisful tyme! with Vertue’s meede,

Ayme to my thoughtes, guide to my word and deede.

The man of action has a destiny, a star he follows, and it draws him on like the Magi, or so it’s said; the taillight of a car, it’s said; the flag of a deer. The creator courts the muse, pays tribute and pursues: sucks, sips, sniffs, puffs, pops, screws—for the favor of his Fancy. The visionary sees the future like a dream-draped dressmaker’s dummy, as silks pinned to the canvas skin of a shameless wire-veined manikin. But we historians, we poets of the past tense, we wait for our tutelary spirits to find us; we sit in one place like the spider; and until that little shiver in the web signals the enmeshment of our prey, we look within for something to lighten our nighttime, the weight of our patience: the fluorescent face of a bedside clock, for example, enamel nailshine, bleached sheet.

What a glorious ring it had once—the call: Come, sacred company of Muses, let us unite our voices to accomplish the fullness of the song, I Phoebus of the thick hair, singing in the midst of you.

The savvier painters rendered the star in the form of a fiery crucifix, but for we historians, we poets of consumed time, it is just the reverse: we begin on the cross, hung in our flesh like the crossed sticks of the scarecrow, and end in a highchair deciphering our cereal box, receiving the fabulous gifts of imaginary kings, and predicting an unbearable future.

There are Muses for the several sorts of writing, but none for any kind of reading. Wouldn’t one need divine aid to get through The Making of Americans, Ivanhoe, Moll Flanders, or Grace Abounding?