W.H. Auden

Auden was kind to the point of being so kind he wouldn't take credit for his kindness. When he heard, for instance, of an old lady in his congregation who suffered from night terrors, "he took a blanket and slept in the hallway of her apartment until she felt safe again." Countless stories of Auden's uncredited kindnesses surface in Edward Mendelson's essay, 'The Secret Auden' in 'The New York Review of Books' (March 20, 2014).

When PJ said the other night, "this being a parent thing is difficult," I thought he was talking to himself. It occurs to me now that he was talking to me, was extending a kindness to a man his age, also a father, who loves his children but is sometimes mystified by the relationship. But perhaps I'm reading too much into it, and he was only talking to himself.

John Gray in his NYRB review of David Runciman's new book, "The Confidence Trap: A History of Democracy from World War I to the Present", writes "the story of democracy is a chapter of accidents whose meaning may never be entirely clear: it is a tale of contingency and confusion." Democracy, it seems, will try anything; its key feature is adaptability, while its downside is an increasing incompatibility with liberal values.

"We must love one another or die," Auden wrote so famously when he was young. The line is almost buried, the last line of the next-to-last-stanza of a long poem that became so famous that it's now in danger of being forgotten, "September 1, 1939."

Auden was the kind of man who "preferred to present himself as less than he was." He always found the outcast standing alone against the wall at a party and talked to him or her as if he or she were the important person in the room and had many valuable things to say.