Peter Taylor again — and that other kind of writer

 A certain detail, even just a name, can derail me. Whatever train of thought I was following is lost, and I’m off on a new track.

Sunday’s note mentioned a name and a phrase. I’m still stuck on them.

The name was Peter Taylor’s. He was a writer of short stories.

I remember reading “A Wife of Nashville,” a story about the cruelty of indifference, of how little value we place on the feelings of other people.

Many stories about the South are about the spectacular kind of violence that created the terror of Jim Crow. Taylor’s stories get to the costs of the soul-killing indifference that can separate neighbors from neighbors and husbands from wives.

The phrase that has stuck in my mind is “the kind of writer one discovers by overhearing better-known writers talk about writers.”

I’ve little to say about Shakespeare. But I’ve had real pleasure from reading less famous writers I heard about when other writers were talking shop.

Charles Lamb, Sir Thomas Browne, Bernard Darwin. I’m trying to remember how I heard about William Trevor.

Montaigne is justly famous, but I didn’t hear about him in a classroom. I started reading Montaigne because another writer, Eric Hoffer, was crazy about him.