If I had died I would naturally have been released from the promise I had made years ago to write a short description of Ravel-stein and to give an account of his life. Having come near death myself, I don't need to fear the guilt the living often feel about those others-parents, wives, husbands, brothers, and friends-in their graves.
Just out of college in the late thirties I was a research assistant helping to compile a geographical guide, and I learned that there was an Athens in almost every state of the union. It was also a fact that A. N. Whitehead had prophesied during a sojourn in Chicago that it was destined to lead the modern world. Intelligence was here for everybody's free use, and so it was highly possible that this city might serve to be a new Athens.
When I told this to Ravelstein I remember that he laughed exorbitantly and said, "If this happens here it won't be because of Whitehead. There wasn't enough philosophy in him to fill a birth day balloon. Not that Russell was much better."
I was interested in such opinions not because I had philosophical ambitions but because without much knowledge of political philosophy, I was preparing to write, had agreed to write, a memoir of Ravelstein, a political philosopher. And I couldn't say whether Whitehead and Russell had or had not developed ideas worth examining. Ravelstein sharply told me not to bother my mind with their studies, essays, and opinions. But I had already read five or six of their books. We should be grateful for good advice in these matters since life is too short to risk a waste of time-an entire month, say, on Russell's _History of Philosophy__, an obviously deformed and even cranky book, very modern in that it tries to spare you the study of several German and French philosophers.
In his own way Ravelstein tried to protect me from poring over the works of the thinkers he most admired. He ordered me to write this memoir, yes, but he didn't think it was necessary for me to grind away at the classics of Western thought. But for the purposes of a short biography I understood him well enough, and I agreed that it should be done by someone like me. Furthermore, I am a great believer in the power of unfinished work to keep you alive. But your survival can't be explained by this simple one-to-one abstract equivalence. Rosamund kept me from dying. I can't represent this without taking it on frontally and I can't take it on frontally while my interests remain centered on Ravelstein. Rosamund had studied love-Rousseauan romantic love and the Platonic Eros as well, with Ravelstein-but she knew far more about it than either her teacher or her husband.
But I would rather see Ravelstein again than to explain matters it doesn't help to explain.
Ravelstein, dressing to go out, is talking to me, and I go back and forth with him while trying to hear what he is saying. The music is pouring from his hi-fi-the many planes of his bare, bald head go before me in the corridor between his living room and his monumental master bedroom. He stops before his pier-glass-no wall mirrors here-and puts in the heavy gold cufflinks, buttons up the Jermyn Street Kisser Asser striped shirt-American Trustworthy laundry-and-cleaners deliver his shirts puffed out with tissue paper. He winds up his tie lifting the collar that crackles with starch. He makes a luxurious knot. The unsteady fingers, long, ill-coordinated, nervous to the point of decadence, make a double lap. Ravel-stein likes a big tie-knot-after all, he is a large man. Then he sits down on the beautifully cured fleeces of his bed and puts on the Poulsen and Skone tan Wellington boots. His left foot is several sizes smaller than the right but there is no limp. He smokes, of course, he is always smoking, and tilts the head away from the smoke while he knots and pulls the knot into place. The cast and orchestra are pouring out the _Italian Maiden in Algiers__. This is dressing music, accessory or mood music, but Ravelstein takes a Nietzschean view, favorable to comedy and bandstands. Better Bizet and _Carmen__ than Wagner and the _Ring__. He likes the volume of his powerful set turned up to the maximum. The ringing phone is left to the answering machine. He puts on his $5,000 suit, an Italian wool mixed with silk. He pulls down the coat cuff with his fingertips and polishes the top of his head. And perhaps he relishes having so many instruments serenading him, so many musicians in attendance. He corresponds with compact disc companies behind the Iron Curtain. He has helpers going to the post office to pay customs duties for him.
"What do you think of this recording, Chick?" he says. "They're playing the original ancient seventeenth-century instruments." He loses himself in sublime music, a music in which ideas are dissolved, reflecting these ideas in the form of feeling. He carries them down into the street with him. There's an early snow on the tall shrubs, the same shrubs filled with a huge flock of parrots-the ones that escaped from cages and now build their long nest sacks in the back alleys. They are feeding on the red berries. Ravelstein looks at me, laughing with pleasure and astonishment, gesturing because he can't be heard in all this bird-noise.
You don't easily give up a creature like Ravelstein to death.
The End