[Originally published on September 20, 2009.]
This morning, in that box in the garage, I found the freshman paper of which Vendler’s review had reminded me [“Things as they are,” September 19, 2009]. It was about an inch down in the stack, titled simply “The Necessary Angel.” In the inch above it, I was astonished to find even some papers I’d written in high school. If I needed any documentary evidence that I really did take seriously “the world of the mind that began to be revealed to me in high school,” I’d say that I have found it – I mean more by the fact that I’ve kept the papers than by the fact that I wrote them, for presumably my classmates were writing papers too. But could they, too, today, lay their hands on them?
