Pulling Back From the Online Brink
An old friend and I meet face-to-face after an internet duel.
Harold Nicolson once remarked of the critic Hugh Trevor-Roper, “among the strings of his lute there is a wire of hate which is apt to twang suddenly with the rasp of a banjo.” Trevor-Roper supposedly once met a reviewee at a conference, found that he liked him—and decided not to go to conferences anymore.
Trevor-Roper often comes to mind after internet duels. Intellectual battle can intoxicate. But the banjo rasps leave an unpleasant echo. I often surrender to the fantasy that my intellectual opponents are my personal enemies—out...