Ave.

Meanwhile, over roughly 50 years, I wrote and had many books published.  They were published by prime American houses; many of them had multiple editions; most of them were translated and then published in perhaps more than a dozen languages and countries around the world.  Highly respected historians praised them.  I had chosen a country life, separate and independent from most professional intellectuals.  Still, my own library grew.  At first it contained perhaps a thousand books in a small study in our house.  I bought more and more.  Then we added a large hexagonal library to our house, which I could afford, along with travel, because of the royalties advanced against my books from publishers.  North of our house, I had a few acres of wilderness.  In 1981, I convinced Stephanie to sell our house and build another one on the northern edge of the wilderness, along a small river, the Pickering Creek.  So we did, in three years.  Perhaps this was my most precious achievement: a handsome house, near perfect, at the end of a long driveway, for months surrounded by green and gold, flowers, and books—a large library on its western side, on two floors.  More than saturated with a rich silence, this library is.  It exudes an atmosphere.  In this house and in its library, I have now lived a third of a century, from my early 60’s on.  Each morning, trying to catch my breath, I stumble down from my bedroom to the library.  There shuffling, I sit now at a narrow desk tapping at keys with my trembling fingers.  Sometimes on late afternoons I go out to sit on my terrace, breathing in the view of a greensward; and yes, thanking God for having allowed me this.  Then, soused with a stiff drink, I return to my surroundings until dinner.

The “Blessings of Old Age”?  Oh, not at all.  How very soon I shall be dead.  In a year?  In a few months?  In a few weeks?  I hope that I will not be constrained to move from here to a communal nursing home.  I hope; but I cannot know.  What I know is that, after my death, this library, this house, will instantly be changed.  They are my inheritance for my children and my stepson.  My house will be sold at once.  My books will go to the library of the University of Notre Dame, thanks to the excellent Rev. Wilson D. (Bill) Miscamble, C.S.C.  My furniture and the decorations, chests, vitrines, armoires, antique clocks, paintings, and etchings on the walls will be dispersed among my children or sold.  They are still my surroundings, which in this country I assembled from an older America, England, France, Austria, and even one or two pieces from my family in Hungary, miraculously regained almost 70 years ago.  Perhaps I have been not much more than an ephemeral owner of an outdated museum.  I am not a survivor.  I am a crumbling remnant.  A remnant of the very end of the Bourgeois Age and a remnant of the Age of Books.  Ave atque vale.

John Lukacs

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