Me at my best

Not my query, but really it's everyone's: where do I excel, that is, what is the point where who I am and what I am synchronizes perfectly with  practical situations such that something good that would be otherwise improbable actually happens?

My friend is pursuing this inquiry explicitly, interested particularly in his interpersonal talents that make a positive mark the people around him.

Two episodes in particular stick out in my mind in terms of what you did and how. I remember the pleasure I felt when, several times, I came into my space and found a book on my desk with a note from you recommending it. It's how I got to know T.C. Boyle, for instance; a happy find. You never tracked me with "Well, did you like it?' but when I mentioned it, you were ready to discuss what it was that you loved. Indeed, you're always ready to talk intelligently about what it is you love and why: an unusual, I must say, and refreshing habit. I rely in part on the loves of others to learn how and what to love. Silence deprives me of others' eyes. You are generous with yours.

I remember, secondly, your Proust project, reading the whole of Remembrance of Things Past, a major undertaking. From time to time I'd check in and learn how Proust and his great work were affecting you. Now you were fascinated, now bored, now understanding what has been obscure before, now appreciating what had seemed incidental or arbitrary, finally getting a sense of the grand scope of Proust's ambition, now plunging to the end full of last page curiosity and page after last sadness.

What an example you were, the very kind I admire: doggedness with delicacy. An intellectual project like this is not, of course, unprecedented, but then neither is climbing Mt Rainier. Its accomplishment deserves respect, but to provide real-time commentary to flat-landers like me such that I 'participated' in the achievement and determined to make the journey myself deserves something more: gratitude.

There are other things I've observed, and many things I haven't that I won't or can't report on: so it is with any life. But whatever the reason for the request for feedback, you've given me a chance to reflect on our encounters, on you, in part on myself. We are too seldom invited to, given permission to, contemplate each other seriously with an aim to personal development. Instead we act as if each of us is perfectly aware of what makes us special, what holds us back, and perfectly complacent about it all. But I think, in fact, we're apt to overlook, ignore, under or over value, or misinterpret key aspects of ourselves, and we know this, and it makes us ill at ease, as my students are when they hear some fraction of what someone says in English but not nearly all.

So, I've learned from our encounters. May there be many more.