Observe how Selig’s reading becomes more rarefied as we reach the college years. Joyce, Proust, Mann, Eliot, Pound, the old avant-garde hierarchy. The French period: Zola, Balzac, Montaigne, Celine, Rimbaud, Baudelaire. This thick slug of Dostoevsky occupying half a shelf. Lawrence. Woolf. The mystical era: Augustine, Aquinas, the Tao Te Ching, the Upanishads, the Bhagavad-Gita. The psychological era: Freud, Jung, Adler, Reich, Reik. The philosophical era. The Marxist era. All that Koestler. Back to literature: Conrad, Forster, Beckett. Moving onward toward the fractured ’60’s: Bellow, Pynchon, Malamud, Mailer, Burroughs, Barth. Catch-22 and The Politics of Experience. Oh, yes, ladies and gentlemen, you are in the presence of a well-read man!

Here we have his files. A treasure-trove of personalia, awaiting a biographer yet unknown. Report cards, always with low marks for conduct. (“David shows little interest in his work and frequently disrupts the class.”) Crudely crayoned birthday cards for his mother and father. Old photographs: can this fat freckled boy be the gaunt individual who stands before you now? This man with the high forehead and the forced rigid smile is the late Paul Selig, father of our subject, deceased (olav hasholom!) 11 August 1971 of complications following surgery for a perforated ulcer. This gray-haired woman with the hyperthyroid eyes is the late Martha Selig, wife of Paul, mother of David, deceased (oy, veh, mama!) 15 March 1973 of mysterious rot of internal organs, probably cancerous. This grim young lady with cold knifeblade face is Judith Hannah Selig, adopted child of P. and M., unloving sister of D. Date on back of photo: July 1963. Judith is therefore 18 years old and in the summertime of her hate for me. How much she looks like Toni in this picture! I never noticed the resemblance before, but they’ve got the same dusky Yemenite look, the same long black hair. But Toni’s eyes were always warm and loving, except right at the very end, and Jude’s eyes never held anything for me other than ice, ice, Plutonian ice. Let us continue with the examination of David Selig’s private effects. This is his collection of essays and term papers, written during his college years. (“Carew is a courtly and elegant poet, whose work reflects influences both of Jonson’s precise classicism and Donne’s grotesque fancy — an interesting synthesis. His poems are neatly constructed and sharp of diction; in a poem such as ‘Ask me no more where Jove bestows,’ he captures Jonson’s harmonious austerity perfectly, while in others, such as ‘Mediocrity in Love Rejected’ or ‘Ingrateful Beauty Threatened,’ his wit is akin to that of Donne.”) How fortunate for D. Selig that he kept all this literary twaddle: here in his later years these papers have become the capital on which he lives, for you know, of course, how the central figure of our investigations earns his livelihood nowadays. What else do we find in these archives? The carbon copies of innumerable letters. Some of them are quite impersonal missives. Dear President Eisenhower. Dear Pope John. Dear Secretary-General Hammarskjold. Quite often, once, though rarely in recent years, he launched these letters to far corners of the globe. His fitful unilateral efforts at making contact with a deaf world. His troubled futile attempts at restoring order in a universe plainly tumbling toward the ultimate thermodynamic doom. Shall we look at a few of these documents? You say, Governor Rockefeller, that “with nuclear weapons multiplying, our security is dependent on the credibility of our willingness to resort to our deterrent. It is our heavy responsibility as public officials and as citizens to save the lives and to protect the health of our people. A lagging civil-defense effort cannot be excused by our conviction that nuclear war is a tragedy and that we must strive by all honorable means to assure peace.” Permit me to disagree. Your bomb-shelter program, Governor, is the project of a morally impoverished mind. To divert energy and resources from the search for a lasting peace to this ostrich-in-the-sand scheme is, I think, a foolish and dangerous policy that. . . . The Governor, by way of replying, sent his thanks and an offprint of the very speech which Selig was protesting. Can one expect more? Mr. Nixon, your entire campaign is pitched to the theory that America never had it so good under President Eisenhower, and so let’s have four more years of the same. To me you sound like Faust, crying out to the passing moment, Bleibe doch, du bist so schoen! (Am I too literate for you, Mr. Vice-President?) Please bear in mind that when Faust utters those words, Mephistopheles arrives to collect his soul. Does it honestly seem to you that this instant in history is so sweet that you would stop the clocks forever? Listen to the anguish in the land. Listen to the voices of Mississippi’s Negroes, listen to the cries of the hungry children of factory workers thrown out of work by a Republican recession, listen to. . . . Dear Mrs. Hemingway: Please allow me to add my words to the thousands expressing sorrow at the death of your husband. The bravery he showed in the face of a life-situation that had become unendurable and intolerable is indeed an example for those of us who. . . . Dear Dr. Buber. . . . Dear Professor Toynbee. . . . Dear President Nehru. . . . Dear Mr. Pound: The whole civilized world rejoices with you upon your liberation from the cruel and unnatural confinement which. . . . Dear Lord Russell. . . . Dear Chairman Khrushchev. . . . Dear M. Malraux. . . . dear. . . . dear. . . . dear. . . . A remarkable collection of correspondence, you must agree. With equally remarkable replies. See, this answer says, You may be right, and this one says, I am grateful for your interest, and this one says, Of course time does not permit individual replies to all letters received, but nevertheless please be assured that your thoughts will receive careful consideration, and this one says, Send this bastard the bedbug letter.

Unfortunately we do not have the imaginary letters which he dictates constantly to himself but never sends. Dear Mr. Kierkegaard: I agree entirely with your celebrated dictum equating “the absurd” with “the fact that with God all things are possible,” and declaring, “The absurd is not one of the factors which can be discriminated within the proper compass of the understanding: it is not identical with the improbable, the unexpected, the unforeseen.” In my own experiences with the absurd. . . . Dear Mr. Shakespeare: How aptly you put it when you say, “Love is not love Which alters when it alteration finds, Or bends with the remover to remove.” Your sonnet, however, begs the question: If love is not love, what then is it, that feeling of closeness which can be so absurdly and unexpectedly destroyed by a trifle? If you could suggest some alternate existential mode of relating to others that. . . . Since they are transient, the product of vagrant impulses, and often incomprehensible, we have no satisfactory access to such communications, which Selig sometimes produces at a rate of hundreds per hour. Dear Mr. Justice Holmes: In Southern Pacific Co. v. Jensen, 244 U.S. 205, 221 [1917], you ruled, “I recognize without hesitation that judges do and must legislate, but they can do so only interstitially; they are confined from molar to molecular motions.” This splendid metaphor is not entirely clear to me, I must confess, and. . . .