'Our Lives Are Permanently Unfinished Projects'

“My bookshelves, like my writings, are haunted by the ghosts of influences past, all remembered with great tenderness, much as one recalls an old flame from college days: Whitney Balliett, Edmund Wilson, William F. Buckley, Jr., A. J. Liebling, Somerset Maugham, Diana Trilling, Randall Jarrell, Otis Ferguson, Joseph Epstein, Neville Cardus.” 

I thrilled to these words when I first read them in the New York Times. Any reader who becomes a writer would. Originality is a myth. Young writers especially, whether consciously or not, ape their predecessors when they encounter a pleasing style. They try on styles like a new sport coat. The author is Terry Teachout, who died on January 13, 2022, at the absurd age of sixty-five. I’ve often tried on Terry’s prose style – learned yet conversational, critical yet never condescending. Terry revives the “regular guy” style of criticism without pandering, and I’ve never quite achieved it. Terry continues:

 

“Do  writers like me ever come to a stopping place, a time when we decide that we are, for good or ill, what we are? I suspect not. Surely our lives are permanently unfinished projects: we choose to remain open to new influences so as not to become frozen into our limitations.”

 

[Terry’s “I’ve Got a Crush on You” (1999) is collected in The Terry Teachout Reader (Yale University Press, 2004). He took his title from the Gershwin song.]