Life is like music, it must be composed by ear, feeling and instinct, not by rule. Nevertheless one had better know the rules, for they sometimes guide in doubtful cases – though not often. – Samuel Butler

Mentsh trakht un Got lakht. – Man plans and God laughs. – Yiddish proverb

                  It’s common enough, as your life edges to its close, to contemplate its shape. Did you progress smoothly from early dreams to eventual achievements, or did your path lurch, veer, mislead, double back? Have your opinions about your path remained steady, or have you, like Shakespeare’s Richard II, played “in one person many people, and none contented?” Such ruminations, if candid, are not sentimental self-indulgence, weak musing past one’s prime, but a just and wholesome reflection on the story with which you’ve been most involved. You haven’t read a book until you know what you think of it. Ditto a life.

                  My life dumbfounds me. Daily I poke myself to ascertain I’m not dreaming, so different is my outcome from any I envisioned. I have been, in mind, an organist, composer, actor, writer, tennis prodigy, scholar, preacher, teacher, editor, publisher, politician, tycoon, ascetic, saint, bachelor, rake, pundit, prophet, the list unrolls. Some of these costumes I donned briefly, others speculatively: none quite fit. Settling on one was unsettling, for I longed to be otherwise, not an alternative but an additional self. This stubborn duality constituted my curriculum: I was forever debating my choice, second-guessing, excoriating my timidity. I was my parents’ dutiful son and, with my door shut, their destroyer, the last and first of my line. 

                  Perhaps the only constant in my account, from age sixteen on, has been my need to say. Few selves, I suspect, have endured such extensive and voluble inspection. Pausing I was invariably amazed at where I’d arrived and perplexed how best to proceed. Who was I really? Why couldn’t I decide? Or maybe I didn’t want to decide, intoxicated by the adventure of not knowing. I enjoyed (I blush to confess) the heroism of being me, wrestling imponderables. Only in the last decades, since finding Jane, and particularly the last half dozen years, since so-called retirement, have I melted into one: I am a writer. Writing is what I do and who I am. That or nothing.

                  To see myself as a writer is not to claim excellence or even competence. That’s for others to assess. It is to fix the star in my sky so I can set my course. For nearly sixty years I have written and published – voluminously – but I never was “a writer”, in quotes, only by the way. I maintained amateur status to protect myself from comparisons with my paragons. As a now-and-then writer I was pretty good, but as a real writer?

                  Retirement rescued me from the laceration of expectations. I no longer cared where I ranked, this was the work I loved, the vocation that suffused my soul. I would do my best, of course, but more importantly, my most. A late-starter, I had to “make up for lost time” (a preposterous conceit), compose as long and much as I was able, till my strength flagged. I couldn’t make my words count, but I could count my words. Your attention urging me on is the miracle of my later years. I never dreamed of being read by such a throng.

                  The scene we confront is dark with woe – yet I am exuberant in saying. I almost welcome our calamity for the challenge it presents to a chronicler – and for our tremulous need for each other in our dread.