The Perfect Distance
When Distance is the Only Way to Coexist
Ralph and Glenn had, between them, written the most popular and well-received books in their genre. Between them, they’d sold millions of copies. Each was a star and a legend.
So, naturally, they should have crossed paths many times, maybe sat on the same panels, attended the same functions, chatted at the same awards’ banquets. And yet, that had never happened.
Not once.
Not once in thirty years.
Not once, ever.
Maryanne, a literary historian, found this curious but not really that surprising. She knew of many similar historical examples, the most famous being the way that Fyodor Dostoevski and Leo Tolstoy, the giants of their domain and their era, contrived never to meet.
And not just not meet. Tolstoy managed not to read any of Dostoevsky’s novels. And Dostoevsky, for his part, lukewarmly praised War and Peace and didn’t much care for Anna Karenina. What an excellent job they did of maintaining both distance and contempt!
Still, the case of Ralph and Glenn managed to surprise her. So, she decided to write to them. Apparently well-known enough herself and with enough cachet to impress them, she got an answer from each of them. If you could call them answers.
Ralph replied, “He’s not my cup of tea.”
Glenn replied, “Ralph who?”
What kind of answers were those?
She and her husband chatted over a class of wine. Bill was cynical generally, and especially cynical when it came to divas.
“It’s super-simple,” Bill said. “It’s just ego.”
“That’s it? Just ego?”
“That’s it.”
“Nothing … I don’t know … richer, deeper, more mysterious? Some complicated Freudian defense, like, I don’t know, projection or denial or something? Or some painful inferiority complex? Or some … I don’t know … clinical disorder … you know, a personality disorder … “
“Nope. Just ego. Pride. More proof that our species is hopeless.”
“Just ego,” Maryanne murmured.
“There’s nothing quite like that amount of ego. It’s the highest of high horses. So amazingly high as to be monumental. Consider those two monuments to ego!”
Time passed. Ralph died first. Glenn wrote a beautiful eulogy, praising Ralph to the skies. The eulogy appeared as a lead piece in a fine magazine. Now their distance was of course perfect—and Glenn could be generous.
Maryanne remembered Tolstoy, who wrote of Dostoevsky after the writer’s death, “There is no writer in modern literature who was equal to Dostoevsky, and now he is gone!”
Yes, gone—the perfect distance.
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