by Richard Stern The Independence Day fireworks were beautiful to watch and hear from our little porch on Tybee Island. Garrison Keilor's "Writer's Almanac" had informed us that it was also Hawthorne's birthday and the one on which Thoreau had moved into his Walden cabin (made by him as Jefferson had made the lap-desk on which he wrote the 1300 odd words of the Declaration). I remembered the famous coincidental deaths this day in 1826 when, hundreds of miles apart, the octogenarians, Adams and Jefferson, breathed their last on that fiftieth anniversary of the day they'd done so much to make great...I remembered too the trip they'd made to visit English gardens and Stratford on Avon, the usually restrained Jefferson going down on his knees to pluck a loose sliver from a chair Shakespeare may have sat on. Those were the days, although I believe that excellent Nebraskan, Warren Buffet, that the average American lives better today than John D. Rockefeller did not all that long ago. Watching Venus Williams outhit Maria Sharapova from Wimbledon as I drank iced coffee and lay back after swimming the day's laps in the condo pool convinced me that the Great Investor was right again. An old friend called to say he was again in depression, milder than the last time a young woman had left him, but nonetheless debilitating and searing. "If a man has character," wrote Nietzsche, "He has a typical experience which recurs over and over." It's likely that a component of the experience is that one can't learn to avoid it. My friend did have some good news. He said that someone was editing Saul Bellow's letters. We'd each received enough of them to know that the collected letters would likely be one of the great books of our literature. For a son's forthcoming birthday, I ordered Karajan's Berlin Philharmonic recording of the nine Beethoven symphonies, thinking his two small children would grow up with some of this sublimity in their heads, and then wondered how much my own life owed to Beethoven, how many thousands of hours in these almost eighty years have been sweetened and deepened by what in his 57 years he conjured out of the small reservation of noise we take in as music. Obviously incalculable, but what a debt I owe (if I think in Buffetian terms). As to what I owe Jefferson, that too is incalculable, although it's not unlikely that at least some of his stupendous contribution to the country of my life would have been done by others of that remarkable group we call our "founding fathers" or such amazing "sons" as his young friend, Merriwether Lewis, who, half my friend's age, killed himself a few years after his tremendous exploration. In any event, the beauty of the fireworks exploding into gorgeous fragments in the black sky over the ocean, had to do, one felt, with the brevity of human celebration as against the quasi-eternity of the setting and the durability of some human achievement.