Log24

"The challenge, of course, especially in light of the collapsing horizon, since I was sixty-five when I started. Also, I wanted especially to study calculus because I never had. I didn’t even know what it was—I quit math after feeling that with Algebra II I had pressed my luck as far as I dared. Moreover, I wanted to study calculus because Amie told me that when she was a girl William Maxwell had asked her what she was studying, and when she said calculus he said, 'I loved calculus.' Maxwell would have been about the age I am now. He would have recently retired after forty years as an editor of fiction at The New Yorker , where he had handled such writers as Vladimir Nabokov, Eudora Welty, John Cheever, John Updike, Shirley Hazzard, and J. D. Salinger. When Salinger finished Catcher in the Rye , he drove to the Maxwells’ country house and read it to them on their porch. I grew up in a house on the same country road that Maxwell and his wife, Emily, lived on, and Maxwell was my father’s closest friend."

— Wilkinson, Alec. A Divine Language  (p. 5). Published
July 12, 2022, by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition.