He once quoted--I bowdlerise it slightly--the grim maxim that

Most human lives are a  short grey arc between domestic spasm and oblivion

to me, but his was much more interesting.  We of course disagreed here
on occasion, but he was one of the more attractive human beings I have
known.

His feeling for both written and spoken language---I never heard him
speak Japanese, but I can vouch for it in English and German---was
unsurpassed.   Like him, I do not believe in the survival of the human
personality after death; but something of us does survive, for a time,
in our friends' memories and in the words we wrote.

Sit tibi terra levis (If, improbably, you were buried and not cremated).

John Gilmore, Ashland, MA 01721 - USA

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