When the uncle of an old friend passed away--most likely from drink, or complications therefrom--Alex kindly bequeathed to me works from the library of Leonard Mack Evans, the uncle. Quite a few books by and about Oscar Wilde, hardcover Modern Library editions of Faulkner novels, and a 1957 Stanford University Press hardcover edition of The Complete Works of Montaigne, Essays, Travel, Journal, Letters. I remember Alex handing me this in particular, knowing how touched I'd be, though unfamiliar with the 16th century writer but by name. I knew the newly deceased as Uncle Len...no, that's not right: I think Alex referred to him as my uncle, Len. His father's brother, and a great influence on the young Alex into adulthood. Classical music, theater, literature, philosophy.
Len, droll, rather heavyset but carrying his bulk quietly and with restrained nobility, once announced to me, then a graduate student in Philosophy for chrissakes at San Francisco State University, that no one should read Nietzsche until at least forty years of age. I was twenty-eight years in 1989, my father had died that February, and Len's admonition thundering in the cold air of the apartment Alex and I rented on the border of Oakland and Berkeley may have been before or after a three-year love of my life of left my heart with no forwarding address or reason on a late afternoon Sunday, May 14th, two weeks before Finals, but I'm long past forty now and, yes, Len was right. The great German philosopher engaged with the historical and philosophical currents of his time, and of the philosophical systems that came before him. The eagerness of a youth in his 20s to pose defying and radical will easily misread Him. Twenty years of homework is needed. I see that now.
During my hours of sorrow over love lost, Len quite sincerely and in tender confidence suggested as a remedy to grab a bottle of wine and sit on the beach, drink, and gaze out across the ocean. He said he often felt comforted at night hearing the far off whistle of a train.
Len would visit us in our apartment from time to time, and I would listen to Alex, a concert pianist, and he discuss literature and music. Len delighted in Delius. Other gay friends of Alex would drop by. Alex one afternoon declared "I feel like I'm in a Noel Coward play, someone should be mixing martinis!" Allusions, literary references, serious but loving engagement with the arts! An intellectual salon I didn't know I hungered for growing up in South Sacramento, but hungry and dissatisfied I escaped west. Or rather, I was pulled.
I believe I am older now than Len was when he died. I still remember my favorite quip Alex told me Len used for boorish guests at a gathering who've outstayed their welcome: "Forgotten, but not gone." Yesterday I grabbed Montaigne off the shelf, and began reading. The French essai means "an attempt". Let's read together, Len. This, my attempt at gratitude.
