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Yet the laws of physics insist that work must move things: A pushes against B, and B moves. What, besides paper, does the columnist move? He wonders that himself. Swiveling in his chair, he catches hummingbirds, bats, butterflies in flutter, pins them to the wall and whispers, "Gotcha." But he doesn't. Today Gaddafi, tomorrow the Chicago Bears. Call this history? Come Thursday, no one will remember how right he was on Tuesday, and the facts may have altered to prove that he was wrong on Tuesday after all, but who will remember that either? Twenty years after his death, maybe ten, how many readers will speak his name? Perhaps all columnists should change their names to Walter Lippmann. In the entire history of the game, only Lippmann's name survives.
So what good is effected in pointing that capacious intelligence at fast-moving targets? Why find the missing piece if even the visible pieces will vanish in a shot? Ask Joe Kraft, and he would have said that the good lies in doing it, in using the mind to grasp everything the world can throw at it, baseballs to missiles, because that is how the mind protects the body, protects itself. Understanding is protection. More: understanding is forewarning. More: understanding is life. The individual column does not count, because a column is not supposed to exist alone. A columnist looks to erect a whole assembly of columns, each single effort standing patiently at attention after it is created, until eventually a population emerges, a civilization emerges. The civilization is both an accumulation of the columnist's ideas and of his being; he is his collected works. More: he has shown that collecting the works is the way a life ought to be built, column by column, displaying both continuity and changes in the structure and in the architect. He has shown the way to make and use a mind.
More: there is always more, a deeper level to spot and land on, like a plane swooping down from bright white and blue into a heavy snow. People like Joe Kraft play Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist all their lives--they cannot help themselves--requesting "more" where others are horrified by, or are deaf to, or fear, or pretend not to recognize the word. The more that is sought is a statement of innocence; one believes in his heart that enlightenment will be cheering, though experience proves that more often it is punishing. Still the optimistic pursuit continues, the pursuer buoyed every morning by that barrage of knocking on the study door, the news that the news is still coming strong, and that the bonfires are still being lighted around the world, signaling that everyone is still present, still cocking their senses for the missing more.
All columnists are fifth columnists. Prominent for a moment, they rapidly go out of view, but the influence stays, and the impulse to contemplate abides. It's not a career deep down; it is a protest against being overwhelmed by the speed of things, against letting the world get away from us. When Dickens' daughter died, he was in London and his wife in the country; he wrote her a letter telling her at the outset, "You must read this letter very slowly." Joe Kraft died on Jan. 10. You must read his death very slowly. The missing piece is the one that counts. --By Roger Rosenblatt