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But fifty or so pages later his recoil from Christian self-sacrifice is palpable once again; he is repelled, for instance, by Thomas à Kempis’s lament, in “Imitation of Christ,” that “truly, it is an affliction to live in the world.”

So that to read the quotations from top to bottom, column by column, was rather like walking through an emergency station set up in a flood area, where, for example, Pascal had been unribaldly bedded down with Emily Dickinson, and where, so to speak, Baudelaire’s and Thomas a Kempis’s toothbrushes were hanging side by side.

He especially recommended St. Augustine’s “Confessions” and Thomas à Kempis’s “The Imitation of Christ.”

These books had a profound impact on my thinking: “The Evolution of Civilizations,” by Carroll Quigley; “Politics as a Vocation,” by Max Weber; “The Denial of Death,” by Ernest Becker; “Imitation of Christ,” by Thomas à Kempis; “Meditations,” by Marcus Aurelius; “The Cure at Troy,” by Seamus Heaney; and “The Guns of August,” by Barbara Tuchman.

Even 15th-century famous spiritual writer German Thomas à Kempis didn’t make it through the process.