The true beauty of the book, then, is that while the early months of the pandemic are the background and occasion for the letters, the friendship they display is vastly more interesting. This is really a book about friendship, not about the pandemic. And if the reference to “twilight” seems just a tad maudlin, if not impossibly romantic, the focus on friendship hits the editorial nail on the head. The pandemic’s early stages were real enough, sufficiently sobering for there to be conversations on death and life, particularly when the writers were well into their 70s. To their credit, or that of the publisher, the title of the book points the reader in a different direction: A Friendship in Twilight. Which only goes to show, I suppose, that great intellects with good pens can still be fairly pedestrian about matters that are not their specialty. Surprisingly, there are few or no comments on the pandemic itself at which this reader at least stopped to think, “Wow, that was an amazing insight!” But there were many where I thought, “Yes indeed, exactly what I was thinking.” Of course, their thoughts are sensitive and accurate filled with the foreboding that was rightly current in the months before there was any vaccine, when we were all more or less locked down and daily seeing frightening tallies of the hospitalized and the dead. Here, I have to confess to a little disappointment. This is really a book about friendship, not about the pandemic.Ĭertainly, it is not unreasonable to expect from these two distinguished authors and thinkers a lively and challenging set of reflections on living through the early months of the pandemic. What was it, then, that made the case for publication? And while it tells a familiar story about how we all reacted to the first months of the pandemic, the immediacy of the letter format is challenged by the fact that, two years later, a lot has changed as a result, many of the comments both authors make understandably seem quite dated. Their exchange, which took place over a mere nine months but stretches to well over 400 pages of text, has been edited down from an original 1,400 or so manuscript pages.
A Friendship in Twilight by Jack Miles and Mark C.
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