Writers Who Appear Nearby

Steven Pinker, speaking in Hudson last night

Last night, Joyce and I joined throngs of people who had gathered at the Hudson Library and Historical Society to see/hear Steven Pinker, a Harvard professor of psychology, who was there to talk about his latest book: Enlightenment Now: The Case for Science, Reason, Humanism, and Progress (Viking, 2018).

He was a few minutes late for his 7 p.m. date with us--and he had a little trouble with his laptop (he used a PowerPoint that rolled along, repeating the points he was making orally), but he spoke eloquently and forcefully about the research he had done to write the book--the discoveries he had made, most of which contradict the dire and depressing narratives which we hear all the time about the lack of progress, about the decline of civilization, about the inescapable crudity and cruelty of humankind. Many graphs and charts to support his arguments.

I had just finished his book the night before the presentation (as always, Dyer puts off his homework till the last possible second!), so almost all of what he was saying was still very fresh in my memory (these days--nothing stays too fresh there for very long, I fear). So ... though I heard little that surprised me (he had surprised me plenty in his pages), it was great to see and hear him and to be in the presence of, well, a thinker.

And since then I've been thinking about the wonderful opportunities we've had at the Hudson Library to hear and see important writers. Just in the last years we've gotten to see (and meet) a wide range of people (not listed in chronological order)--James McBride (whose The Good Lord Bird, a novel about John Brown, had just won the National Book Award for fiction), Nathaniel Philbrick (popular historian--Mayflower, In the Heart of the Sea, In the Hurricane's Eye), Fred Kaplan (popular biographer of Gore Vidal, John Quincy Adams, and others), Mary Doria Russell (novelist, author of Doc and Epitaph),  Paula McLain (novelist, author of The Paris Wife and Love and Ruin), David S. Reynolds (popular historian and biographer, author of John Brown, Abolitionist and Walt Whitman's America)--and so many others.

The library is only about a half-mile from our house--an easy walk in the good weather, an easy drive in the bad (like last night!). So without really expending much effort, we have been in the presence of some of America's finest minds, some of America's finest writers. What a gift.

And another gift? The writers do a book-signing afterward, and I (eager collector of authors' autographs) am almost always the first in line, mostly because I skip the Q&A after the talk (relying on Joyce's later summaries!) and hurry out to the Signing Spot to wait for the writer to arrive. Kind of childish, I guess, but there's something important about Keeping the Child in Us Alive, right? (Pinker signed three for me last night ... uh, for us.)

Anyway, thanks to the library's archivist, Gwen Mayer, who has arranged so many of these events (all?)--and for all the other personnel who make things go so smoothly--from arranging the chairs to hooking up the projector and microphone to ... things so subtle I don't even know what they are.