University Diaries » Another post about Gore Vidal.

Here’s Vidal, at the end of his memoir, Palimpsest::

I’ve… been reading through this memoir, adding, subtracting, writing over half-erased texts, ‘palimpsesting’ – all the while looking for clues not so much to me, the subject, if indeed I am the subject, as to what [my] first thirty-nine years were all about… [on] the small planet that each of us so briefly visits.

Recognizing that his patterns are all about an imperishable youthful love for a classmate killed at Iwo Jima, Vidal concludes his book in this way:

Finally, I seem to have written, for the first and last time, not the ghost story that I feared, but a love story, as circular in shape as desire (and its pursuit), ending with us whole at last in the shade of a copper beech.

Vidal will be buried near his lover in Rock Creek Cemetery.

Your bloggeure has occasionally sung in the chorus of St Paul’s Episcopal church, where the cemetery is located. A very rich aesthetic experience – the music, and then, after, the walk through the graveyard.

I’ll do a Vidal pilgrimage, and write about it here, once he gets there.

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