Writers In Conversation

At the risk of being too literary and too media obsessed at once, here is another article:

http://cavett.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/13/writers-bloc-when-updike-and-cheever-came-to-visit/

In the short musings of Mr. Cavett (a man whose show I have never seen, although I vaguely know he is culturally important) on Cheever and Updike, a fascinating truth is revealed: authors are in conversation at all times, not just on talk shows. As an English major, I learned both about this fact, and the inherent unknowableness of this conversation, aside from the historically possible. T.S. Eliot thought all great literature was a part of the conversation, and yet it is impossible for us to say which author has read which other author (unless he writes a review). Some works we think we can take for granted as having been read, Moby Dick, perhaps, or The Great Gatsby. But then there are all those canonical works that almost no one has read, i.e. Paradise Lost, and The Canterbury Tales (not even English undergrads have to read these nowadays). So where do our daily authors fall?

I am pretty certain, now and then, that I can find threads, answers to Dostoevsky's questions in Wendell Berry. Riffs on Goethe's stories in the Virginian. This might be romantic, but it something in which I take joy. We are all on this planet together, and even for those of us who can't get the words to act quite as magically as Cheever or Updike, we can appreciate that others are there, at the table, talking.