Sixty-two years after President John F. Kennedy's assassination, I find myself drawn to the eddies of memory, those "spots of time" that refuse to fade and insist on revealing anew how private lives intersect with public history. Some dates become lodestars in the mind; Nov. 22 is one of mine, a day that binds my own story to a moment that convulsed a nation and reshaped a generation.

During a recent telephone conversation with my older son about my memories of President Kennedy's assassination, he noted how his generation knows the event only through books and documentaries, not through lived experience. For him, 9/11 occupies the place that Nov. 22, 1963, holds for mine.

We instinctively frame history--and our lives--through the lenses of "before," "during," and "after." This peculiar human lens draws the broad arc of events into personal focus, allowing us to feel like participants rather than distant observers of collective catastrophes. Before the Depression, during the war, after the fire--such markers become the scaffolding for the familiar "I remember when," "I was on my way to," and other Chaucerian prefaces to our narratives. And today, countless people around the world still recall exactly where they were when the news first reached them of President Kennedy's assassination.

Nov. 22 is also Lebanon's Independence Day--and my birthday. The events of 1963, occurring a world away from the United States, nonetheless carved an enduring channel in my life.

In 2013, my colleagues honored me by selecting me to deliver the April Last Lecture, one of two campus forums devoted to cross-disciplinary intellectual conversation--a kind of sacred dialogue of wisdom, as Abbot Suger might put it, meant to shed lux nova, that "new light" he prized. These gatherings echo Socrates' admonition that "the unexamined life is not worth living." Standing near the close of a 40-year career, I chose not a conventional scholarly lecture but a meditation on the early magic that blossomed between the covers of books--childhood and adolescent "spots of time" that shaped my character and set me on a lifelong love affair with the written word.

Drawing on William Wordsworth's "Prelude"--the longest autobiographical poem in English, composed over four decades with the companionship of Samuel Taylor Coleridge--I explored how memory, imagination, and experience interweave. Wordsworth's kaleidoscopic journey through his earliest recollections affirms that we are indeed the sum of our vita activa and vita contemplativa, ascending, as Blake would have it, toward a higher........

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