Travel Blog

At the Biltmore last Friday, my friend David reminisced about his days at Columbia University in the late 60s, when he majored in English and had as professors Lionel Trilling and Edward Said.

Said had the class read books by Dickens, Flaubert, Tolstoy, etc. "And every one of them," David said, "was about a deteriorating marriage." Said was going through a divorce at the time, David explained, and his lectures were brilliant.

Students who took the course the following semester found it disappointing. "He had gotten a divorce," David said.