Monday, September 29, 2014

`Obscurely Wise and Coarsely Kind'

We are preparing a Festschrift for D.G. Myers, who died on Friday. Thanks to the generosity of its publisher and editor-in-chief, Greg Wolfe, the journal Image will host our remembrance of David and his contributions as writer, scholar, blogger, teacher, father, husband and friend. We expect it to be up and running within several days. Editing the contributions of so many writers has been a humbling task, one that provides welcome distraction from the knowledge that David’s words are at an end. Dr. Johnson’s lines from “On the Death of Dr. Levet” offer consolation:

“Yet still he fills Affection’s eye,
Obscurely wise and coarsely kind;
Nor, lettered Arrogance, deny,
Thy praise to merit unrefined.”


Dave Lull found this photograph posted by David Myers five years ago. I’ve never been in better company, all around.

Again, thanks go to Dave Lull for alerting me to David Myers’ web pages from the Texas A&M University server preserved in the Internet Archives, and to a remembrance of David and links to some of his work at Commentary.

1 comment:

Rand Careaga said...

The Commentary tribute is kind enough, but its failure to mention that Podhoretz personally fired him a couple of years ago (for presuming to suggest that the GOP was behind the curve on the issue of same-sex marriage) strikes me as just a tad disingenuous. I'm put in mind here of a line from Maugham's Cakes and Ale:

"Most of us when we do a caddish thing harbour resentment against the person we have done it to, but Roy's heart, always in the right place, never permitted him such pettiness. He could use a man very shabbily without afterward bearing him the slightest ill-will."