(From Irwin Edman’s Under Whatever Sky, 1951.)

A macabre practical joker once appeared at the front door in the middle of a dinner party given by an older friend of mine, then a very lively dean. The man insisted on seeing the head of the house; and when the host appeared at the door, the visitor turned out to represent a local undertaking firm. He had come on a telephoned request to take charge of the body of our host, who was intelligibly not amused.

At a large university recently, an eminent scholar, who had reason to believe his writings were fairly well known, had a similar experience. The Secretary turned over to him a letter addressed to the University from a small town in California. The letter inquired whether the University would enable the correspondent to “contact” the scholar in question. “He was,” so the letter ran, “connected with your university, I believe, about twenty-five years ago. If you would give me his present whereabouts, I should greatly appreciate it. I have no way of knowing what has become of him.” The eminent thinker brooded over this missive.

Everyone broods at some time or another over the obscurity, the anonymity, the zero place of his own personality in his era. Swift is said to have remarked when he looked, years after its writing, at A Tale of a Tub: “My God, I had genius when I wrote that.” Many another writer, looking at an early work of his own, can only reflect on how long forgotten it is. Max Beerbohm once found in a secondhand bookshop a book that long ago he had “affectionately” inscribed to a friend. He bought the book, wrote in it “still affectionately,” and mailed it to the friend who had disposed of it.

How often one meets the ghosts of former celebrities, men and women whose names once meant something to practically every literate person. It is a shock that they are still alive; one feels it would have been much more decent and proper of them to have been buried with their reputations. They have no right to be perambulating in so belated a living air. They constitute reminders, too discouraging, of the transiency of fame.

My friend replied to the inquiry as to what had become of him that he presumed he was still identical with the person being sought. But was he? Are we not all distant echoes of earlier selves, of transformed personalities going by the same name? “Whatever has become of so and so?” we ask. Whatever has become of me, one sometimes asks himself or should ask. But — the consoling thought comes to us — our essential being, our authentic self, has changed no more than (until very old age) our own familiar voice changes. It is only the public mask of one stage of our lives that has vanished. Thus, the modishness of a given art critic may have disappeared, but his delight in art itself may last freshly and happily through his obscure last years. Marcus Aurelius warned us against relying upon the externalities of wealth, of friends, of fame. He followed his own warning and retired into the fortress of his own soliloquy. It is not his fault that by so doing he insured his future fame. While he was still alive, there must have been someone in some remote corner of the Roman Empire who asked, “What has become of Marcus Aurelius?” — or, when he passed by in some place remote from Rome, “Now who on earth is that?”