… is a beautiful farmhouse on a snowy night in Upstate New York. Les UDs were getting started in their academic careers, both teaching at the University of Rochester, and they’d been invited to take part in a faculty discussion group that met at various homes. I don’t remember the subject of the reading group; neither does Mr UD.

Perez Zagorin, a history professor, was the genial host that night. Christopher Lasch sat to my left, smoking. He was emotionally intense. He was always intense.

Mr UD thinks we might have been discussing Jacques Derrida, which would explain why I recall Lasch not only as intense, but as angry.

I do remember thinking that if we ended up staying in Rochester (we didn’t want to) the thing to do would be exactly what Zagorin had done: Get a farmhouse and some acres in the hills outside the city.

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That was almost thirty years ago.

Today UD reads two obituaries, first that of Zagorin’s wife, a noted artist. She died April 17.

He died nine days later. Both were 88.

Here’s an excerpt from an interview Zagorin gave about his wife at the time of a 2007 exhibit of her work at the Smithsonian (“Anatomy of a Painting: Honoré Sharrer’s Tribute to the American Working People,” Lawrence A. Fleischman Gallery of the Archives of American Art.).

When Kathy Calderwood – when we first knew her, she came over to our house one day… We had a big fireplace there. It was very pleasant, we were having a conversation. … I said to her, what’s so great about self-expression? I said, the self isn’t that important. She was stunned by it.

I mean, when you’re a worker, such as Honoré is, you don’t think about self-expression at all. … [S]he was not an artist. I don’t ever recall her ever thinking – just wasn’t, and for myself as a historian and a writer – of course, I have the experience of intellectual creativity, which is very satisfying and sometimes exciting, but it’s the work that counts; it’s not the self. It’s so tiresome, you see. And I think this profoundly important in dealing with [university] students.

When I have students … I feel great concern about – I would never humiliate a student or anything like that, and I have had quite close relations with some of my students. What I want to teach them is to be competent, to be really good at something, and when you’re good at something, you’re confident of yourself and you’ll be wanted. And it’s hard work.

… [S]elf-expression should be – it’s like happiness.

The greatest work of moral philosophy in the Western tradition and quite possibly of the literature the whole world is Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, and it begins with the theme that all men aim at happiness. But how do you – you don’t aim at happiness. Happiness is not a goal. Happiness is the byproduct of the things you do. And I could say, truly, I’ve had a happy life and I know Honoré’s had a happy life, and that was because we were all the time doing just what we wanted to be doing. Happiness emerged, it effervesced.

So you don’t aim – I mean, to your husband, your self is very important, and it should be, and the other way … the other way around. But for other people, why should they give a damn about your self? There’s a famous remark that T.S. Eliot made with regard to self-expression… One of his critical essays has a remark to the effect that – he posits a disjunction between the artist’s personal emotions and sufferings, and the work, which is a very anti-romantic attitude, and he always said he was in favor of classicism. I mean, not that there aren’t romantic elements in his work, there are, but this is a distinct critique of romanticism.

And so – and many people have hunted out the personal things in his work which seem to run contrary to the doctrine of impersonality, but in speaking about self-expression, he says somewhere – he says, self-expression – but of course, you have to have something to express, and that’s the heart of the thing, you see. These selves that are being expressed in those [purely personal] cases, we must respect individuals, but they are very ordinary selves. They haven’t anything much to say. So that’s why Kathy was stunned by this remark of mine. The work is everything…