For those who cherish the life of the mind, one of the saddest events of 2012 was the death of the great historian Jacques Barzun. If a loss can be said to be pregnant with meaning, this one surely was. It was not as if the event were unexpected or premature; the legendarily prolific Barzun was, after all, but a month shy of his 105th birthday. (Although his publication in 2000 of the masterly 900-page tome From Dawn to Decadence, at the age of 93, might have encouraged the thought that almost anything was possible for this extraordinary man.) But when it finally came, the departure from the American scene of a man who so brilliantly embodied all that is richest and best in the much-abused word “culture” seemed to mark the end of an era, a curtain-lowering that left us without the promise of any encore or sequel. Such gloomy presentiments seemed to hang heavy over the reflections of those writers who commented on the significance of his passing. They could not help but intimate that something else was also in danger of passing away.

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