ON JUNE 28, MORTIMER J. ADLER, propagandist for the reading of great books, indexer extraordinaire, and the world’s highest-salaried philosopher, died at the age of ninety-eight.

I worked for Mortimer, as we all called him, in the late 1960s. After a year-long stint as the director of an anti-poverty program in Little Rock, Arkansas, I had acquired, through the good offices of Harry Ashmore, a job as something called "senior editor" at Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., in Chicago. As with every other job I have ever had, I was not so much eager for this job as I was to escape the job I then held. (White flags were shooting up everywhere in what was unhappily called "The War on Poverty.") So I was hired, along with ten or twelve others, to design a vast, genuinely radical revision of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. The pay was high, the comedy turned out to be wild, and the job put me back in Chicago, city of my birth.

Apologies to Diderot, D’Alembert, & Co., but the making of encyclopedias has never seemed to me of much interest. I felt no more affinity for cross-referencing than I did for cross-dressing. Etymologically buried within the word "encyclopedia" is the notion that all knowledge is a great, linked circle. Not at all my idea of a good time: altogether too intertwined, vast, grandiose. But it was something to do until I felt the need to escape this job, too, which four years later I did.

I was hired not by Mortimer Adler, but by a man named Warren Preece, a former journalist who had been executive secretary at the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, then a very slow-moving and luxuriously run think tank in Santa Barbara, California, which was said handsomely to illustrate nothing so much as the Leisure of the Theory Class. Things at Britannica, Inc., at the outset certainly couldn’t have been more leisurely or theoretical. We were asked to write papers suggesting themes around which the new Encyclopaedia Britannica might best be organized. I wrote one on "struggle" as a possible theme—a paper that, if I have any luck at all, will long ago have been shredded, lost, or disintegrated. An entire week, sometimes two, would go by without having anything to do. Meanwhile, the unterwerkers, the subject editors and the picture editors, working in the hard gravel of fact on which any good reference work depends, kept things going on Britannica, doing the real work of running an encyclopedia.

After a year or so of this high-level dithering, Mortimer Adler was brought in to organize the new set. His energy and stamina were greater than those of anyone I have ever known. I have seen him lecture—browbeat is closer to it—a room of specialists on each of their own subjects for ten hours, do a two-hour call-in radio show interview afterwards, return home to work on a book (he liked to turn out one a year), and, I should not have been in the least shocked to learn, end the day by making vigorous love to his thirty-odd-years-younger wife, and at last fall asleep doubtless while attempting to draw a bead on some tangled epistemological problem.
Val:Y