This evening I came across a paragraph by Marcel Proust that begins: "When from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered..." and thought of Vivianne Hermann. Holocaust survivor, sculptor of some fame, teacher. Not long before Vivianne was diagnosed with liver cancer, she told me she was re-reading Proust, "amid the ruins of all the rest."

I once wrote, "My dead friends keep me alive." So tonight I will host their stellar spirits. Like Po Chü-i and his pals, we'll recall the times we spent together, brag of our accomplishments, and drink toasts to the folly of our lives.