A Greek word, storge, denotes a tender care, affection uniting parents and children. Perhaps some teachers feel such a love for their pupils. It is also not impossible that storge may be applied to the relationship between a poet and generations of readers to come: underneath the ambition to perfect one’s art without hope of being rewarded by contemporaries lurks a magnanimity of gift-offering to posterity.

—CZESLAW MILOSZ

A Book of Luminous Things

At Laguna, when someone dies, you don’t “get over it” by forgetting; you “get over it” by remembering.

—LESLIE MARMON SILKO

The Delicacy and Strength of Lace

Introduction

Max Ritvo began as my student. I met Max when he was a senior at Yale. This is how he began his application to get into my playwriting workshop:

Dear Professor Ruhl,

Thanks for reading this application. My name is Max Ritvo—I’m a senior English major in the Creative Writing Concentration. All I want to do is write.

His application said that he was a poet and a comedian, part of an experimental comedy troupe. A poet and he’s funny? Huh. I reread his application, which had been left to stew in the “no” pile because he’d never written a play before.

And because funny poets are a rare and wonderful species of human being, I moved Max to the “yes” pile, despite his lack of experience writing plays. It is hard to imagine now that Max’s application could ever have remained in any other pile—a strange parallel universe in which I never met Max.

Max walked into my first class and it was as though an ancient light bulb hovered over his head, illuminating the room. Skinny to the point of worry, eyes luminous blue and large, even larger under his thick glasses. His eyes (both magnified and magnifying) were especially animated after he’d amused someone, anyone; with a hangdog look, he’d gaze up from behind his spectacles to see if the joke had found a target. His voice: surprisingly booming for so slight a frame. Some rarefied combination of a young Mike Nichols and an old John Keats, he seemed eighty years old and not from this century. Who is this boy? I wondered. He seemed to have read everything, from Vedic texts to contemporary poetry, and yet he had the air of a playful child.

The first missive I received from Max in my inbox began like this:

Dear Professor Ruhl,

I am writing because, before shopping period had even begun or I had even realized that this wonderful class existed, I booked tickets for Einstein on the Beach at the Brooklyn Academy of Music for this coming Friday.

Little did he know that I had longed to see Einstein on the Beach, had tried in fact to get a ticket, but it was sold out. Nothing could have been more delightful to me than a student who had the foresight to book tickets to a difficult and avant-garde theatrical epic. Max went on to apologize and ask permission to miss a class. I told Max that he must go, and I asked him for a short report (no more than five minutes) on the experience of seeing the show. I said maybe he could join us for the first part of class, then hightail it to Brooklyn to hear the great Philip Glass score.

Max wrote back, “Dear Sarah” (it took us two letters to drop the institutional formalities):

The show starts at seven. I’m worried if I leave later I won’t

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