Memorial Days

“Our marriage still the one thing I feel is utterly mine, created out of clean cloth, no taint of all that makes me uncomfortable, my refuge. Without her, god knows…really sure of nothing but her these days, of my love for her which I wish I knew better how to express.”

No thanks to judge Tony, apparently. On the first page of the galley, Tony has scrawled: Name & product dropping. Padded. I’d been reluctant to pick the book up, but now Tony’s brusque dismissal of this acclaimed memoir makes me smile.

Of all the things I miss about Tony—his lilting speaking voice, his gentle hands—it’s this most of all: He made me laugh every single day. He could see absurdity, puncture pomposity, pull off practical jokes of maddening plausibility.

Et in Arcadia

“In his writing he was always at his funniest, his smartest, his most thoughtful, and his most courageous and adventurous…. Prose so good it would make you laugh until you cried. I recognize now that his books are not the shade of him. They’re the quintessence of his soul, the distillation of a great adventurer and a good man. He’s still with us th

Nature is a remorseless reminder of human insignificance. Daytime, nighttime—there’s no escape from the realization of how little we matter.

My ambitions, such as they were, had always been my own. My parents had never pushed me. Whatever I did was just fine by them. If I got distinctions, they were thrilled, but they didn’t expect them, and there was no sense that I’d disappoint them if I fell short.

‘Take that, you running-dog, raghead-loving J-Streeter!’ he

Alone in Cairo on February 27, 1989, he wrote: “It seems very remote now that I shall ever really amount to something in journalism.” Reading this, alone on the deck, I hoot with laughter. By Christmas of that same year, he would be dodging rifle fire on the streets of Timişoara, covering Romania’s revolution as the new star reporter in The Wall St