Around Thanksgiving I wanted to mention one thing for which I was particularly thankful, but then the time got away from me, so let me do it now.

I often write on this blog about frauds and charlatans and egoists of various types, because there are so many of them and they get away with so much, and because I am cranky that way. (For better or worse, I attribute this to my father, who was impatient with piffle and puffery.)

I also deplore these rogues, charming and not, because they often steal attention away from men and women of great accomplishment who are less good at self-promotion. I like to write about those folks as well. It is my theory that one of the keys to really enjoying life is recognizing the presence of brilliance in your midst, because it is so timeless but also so transient.

On that subject, I was delighted to read a couple of weeks ago that Bernard Bailyn has a new book out, The Barbarous Years—The People of North America: The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600-1675.

Had I stayed in graduate school to write my thesis instead of dropping out to rejoin the world, Bud Bailyn would have been my thesis adviser. He was certainly the most powerful and exciting intellectual presence I encountered at Harvard, and in a strange way, he’s the reason I dropped out: I knew I would never be half the historian that he is, and I didn’t want to study for years and years only to emerge as Salieri. But I never resented Bailyn for that; I admired him for the vast scope of his knowledge and the vigor of his insights. He could be a terrifying teacher—one did not want to walk into Bailyn’s seminar unprepared—but he was a deeply inspiring one.

And here’s another thing I always loved about Bailyn’s work, something that he doesn’t get sufficient credit for: He is an absolutely beautiful writer. One should read his books and essays not just for their intellectual content, but for the grace and clarity of his prose.

My favorite short piece of Bailyn’s is “The Index and Commentaries of Harbottle Dorr,” which is contained in his book Faces of Revolution. (You can start the essay by searching inside the book on Amazon, here.)

It is a gem of an essay about the principles and passions of an ordinary man in the years preceding the American Revolution, and I find it incredibly moving; this is a little embarrassing to admit, but the last sentence of that essay has moved me to tears on more than one occasion. Hundreds of years later, I feel some connection with Harbottle Dorr. Take away the WordPress, and my sputterings and ruminations are not so different from his.

Of course, not everyone will feel such a connection, but…read the first paragraph; it is a perfect paragraph. You simply can not write a better paragraph than that.

And that was another reason why I dropped out of graduate school; because such simple, straightforward, yet compelling writing was so out of academic vogue.

(I remember going to Skip Gates’ job talk in 1990, I think, and quickly dissolving into laughter—quickly muffled laughter—as Gates delivered sentence after sentence so freighted with academic jargon, nobody in the room had the slightest idea what he was talking about…but everyone was pretending to. I got the impression that even Gates didn’t know what he was saying, but was just playing a game of academic Mad Libs—and he was smart enough to know that it didn’t much matter.)

I couldn’t write the stuff that was trendy, had no interest in writing it, and so it seemed that my path to advancement was at least partially blocked.

So: This is a long way of saying what a pleasure it is to see that there is a new book from Bernard Bailyn and how excited I am to read it.