Dear John Dickerson

I’ve been listening to you for years, but always as the smart, incisive commenter on current affairs. To be sure, history and theology and whimsy were never far from your commentary, but these were glimpses only. Your new venture, Naval Gazing, opens the door to your inner life, and I’ve loved it. Thank God you took notes, and kept the notebooks, because in the rush of everything to waste, as Robert Frost put it, it’s hard to hold onto anything at all. With small children and an absorbing job, I find it all but impossible to write down what’s happened, let alone any further reflection on what what’s happened means. I’m encouraged that even your hasty, harried shorthand is meaningful enough to you, years later, to build these beautiful essays on.

When I listened to the 9/11 episode, the one that explains why and how you opened the books, I was walking in autumn beside a lake and the sky was grey but the trees were bright and the lake shone and the place we call Black Mountain was perfectly reflected in it. I was very moved by the September 11 stories (who would not be?) and the elegy for a loved father-in-law, and at the same time realised I’d been moved by all of it — every episode. In each one there comes a moment, or a passage, when the long looking yields its riches and you stand on the heights of what all this detail amounts to. You realise anywhere you stop is a vantage point if you only look. There is after all something moving about being still.

I was most moved by the voice in the final episode - the one that’s not yours. A woman named Caroline describes her hard and humble and extraordinary life. It was a kind of unbearable grace to hear from her, and to know that someone like her is aflourish on the other side of the world. Then you reflected on the lights in other houses, and the blessing you wish on other lives. I was walking through a department store this time, and I was undone. Thank you for the gift of this undoing.

The lines that have haunted my listening all along come from Marilynne Robinson, who I feel sure you love as I do. In Gilead, old John Ames writes to his little son: ‘This is an interesting planet. It’s worth all the attention you can give it.’ Likewise, ‘There are a thousand thousand reasons to live this life, every one of them sufficient.’ And again, ‘It has seemed to me sometimes as though the Lord breathes on this poor gray ember of Creation and it turns to radiance — for a moment or a year or the span of a life. And then it sinks back into itself again, and to look at it no one would know it had anything to do with fire, or light .... Wherever you turn your eyes the world can shine like transfiguration. You don’t have to bring a thing to it except a little willingness to see.’

All this reminds me, too, of Annie Dillard, who’s also been at the back of all my listening to you. In her book of long looking, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, she wanders, awed, around Roanoke and spends whole days looking (‘Spend the afternoon! You can’t take it with you.’) The tone is an abiding astonishment at the universe, and she concludes: ‘My God what a world. There is no accounting for one second of it.’

Accounting for it, or trying to, is both impossible and worthwhile. We can’t, of course, but all the attempts - in writing and art and music - are what give life its lustre. Your essays, accounting for your own passage through this unaccountable universe, have given a glow to my days, a new intensity to my attention, and a hope that one day my own books will be opened and I might find something there worth looking at. Thank you, again, for this gift.

Sincerely.