I’m very saddened by the death of Louis Auchincloss, one of the most astute and insightful writers of the last century and, more to the point for me, the father of one of my closest friends.

Others more qualified (and more objective) than I will discuss Mr. Auchincloss’ literary legacy. To me, he represented a kind of cultural intelligence to which I always aspire (but will never attain); Mr. Auchincloss was a deeply learned man who seemed to know everything there was to know about literature, art, and history. He was a gracious, if sometimes (through no fault of his own) intimidating host—it was hard not to be intimidating when you were that smart and that worldly—and one of the most enjoyable conversationalists one could ever hope to sit down at a meal with, which is a wonderful and fading art. Perhaps unexpectedly for a man of his background, Mr. Auchincloss was always more interested in the truth of a situation than the propriety of it.

He was, of course, a man out of his time in recent years—the years of reality TV, YouTube and Twitter. He was in his ninth decade; how could he not be? Yet American culture needed him, even if we didn’t always realize it, even if the vast majority of Americans had no idea who he was. We need what he represented. We are moving forward without history, and that is why the loss of Louis Auchincloss is such a deep one. He carried history within him, and he was also a piece of it. The only remaining figure of his type is Gore Vidal, and Vidal of late has not been himself.

In knowing Mr. Auchincloss a little bit, I was fortunate enough to see a model of intelligence and scholarship. I could never hope to equal that model, not by a longshot, but he provided me with a sense of what a mind could do, and once one has that sense, it becomes harder to settle for the surface of things.