`The Best and Closest of All Your Friends'

Dr. Lewis Thomas, like so many others, seems to be fading from cultural memory. Thomas was a physician, a researcher in microbiology and immunology, who in 1973 became president of the Sloan-Kettering Institute. Two years earlier, while chairman of the Department of Pathology at Yale Medical School, Thomas was asked by the editor of the New England Journal of Medicine to write a monthly essay, “Notes of a Biology Watcher,” each about 1,000 words – enough to fill one page of the Journal. Thomas had published poetry as a young man but in his seventh decade discovered a gift for writing succinct, thoughtful, elegant, wide-ranging essays. In 1974, Viking collected 29 of them and titled the collection The Lives of a Cell. It won the National Book Award. Thomas published five more books and died, age 80, in 1993.

This overlap of medicine and literature – Keats, Chekhov, William Carlos Williams, Céline, Walker Percy – had always interested me and may have accounted for my early attraction to Thomas’ essays. I remember with peculiar vividness the first time I read them, working nights at an ARCO gas station/carwash in Youngstown, Ohio, in 1975-76, in the days before mandatory self-service and credit-card purchases at the pump. We greeted customers, pumped gas and checked their oil if they wanted it. We wore flimsy blue coveralls with “ARCO” embossed on the chest. The sleeves and legs were too short and we were forbidden in winter to obscure the corporate logo with a jacket or sweater, so we froze at the pump.

Fortunately, business was sparse at night so I spent most of my shift in the office, feet on the desk, reading and trying to keep warm. Among the books I remember from that period are Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, George Steiner’s After Babel, Dos Passos’ USA, and The Lives of a Cell. The impression I retain from my first encounter with Thomas is of being in the presence of a civilized man. He drew effortlessly upon science, medicine, literature, music, the news and his life. He was never cheaply cynical or self-regarding, and never behaved as though his words constituted Holy Writ. He thought a lot and let us, the readers, in on the process. Inevitably, he recalled the father of all good essayists, Montaigne.

In his second collection, The Medusa and the Snail (1979), Thomas acknowledged his lineage and included “Why Montaigne is Not a Bore.” We know what he means: Montaigne claimed to have no subject but himself, which ought to be a prescription for unrelieved tedium. Pause for a moment and consider the people you know for whom the only concern is King (or Queen) Self. You cease existing in the prolonged company of such people. Thomas writes of Montaigne:

“He is resolved from the first page to tell you absolutely everything about himself, and so he does. At the greatest length, throughout all 876 pages of the [Donald] Frame translation, he tells you and tells you about himself.

“This ought to be, almost by definition, the achievement of a great bore. How does it happen that Montaigne is not ever, not on any of all those pages, even a bit of a bore?”

Thomas says he at first found “Apology for Raymond Sebond,” Montaigne’s longest essay, an “interminable” and “dull” defense of reason. “Then, one day, I got into it, and never got out again.” Why? Because, he writes, “…Montaigne simply turns his mind loose and writes whatever he feels like writing.” Thomas fails to point out that it’s also helpful to have something to say and to say it memorably. And genius doesn’t hurt. Thomas continues:

“Montaigne makes friends in the first few pages of the book, and he becomes the best and closest of all your friends as the essays move along. To be sure, he goes on and on about himself, but that self turns out to be the reader’s self as well. Moreover, he does not pose, ever. He likes himself, to be sure, but is never swept off his feet after the fashion of bores. He is fond of his mind, and affectionately entertained by everything in his head.”

I wrote a friend on Wednesday, asking how it felt to no longer report daily to an office. He answered:

“It's an interesting experience -- of course, just about everything is interesting if you take the trouble to observe it (except politics: the more closely I observe that, the more repellent it seems).”

That’s the spirit of Montaigne and Thomas – minds strong, mature and nimble enough to find the world, inside and out, a bottomless source of interest. Boredom is laziness or an affectation of cool. In some quarters, to be interested in the ways of the world, in its mystery, is unforgivably unhip. After quoting Montaigne at some length, Thomas writes:

“And so, on he goes, page after page, giving away his thoughts without allowing himself to be constrained by any discipline of consistency. `The greatest thing in the world,’ he writes, “is for a man to know how to be his own.’ As it turns out, contrary to his own predictions, what emerges is all his own, all of a piece, intact and solid as any rock. He is, as he says everywhere, an ordinary man. He persuades you of his ordinariness on every page.”