An oasis of comfort amid the banality

I had to unplug and flee the Web for a while today in an escape from the incessant Wacko Jacko Palooza.

At a bookstore I found a new copy of "The Best and the Brightest," David Halberstam's epic portrayal of the architects of American policy in Vietnam. Yesterday Robert McNamara died. You might have missed it, given that all-news were dedicated to one story, one story only.

The late Halberstam, a fierce critic of celebrity obsession but comfortable in the public eye, thankfully didn't witness the farcical media circus from Los Angeles. He's been one of my favorite journalists, and it was that book that set him on the course for a fabulous career as one of the best historical authors of our times.

The new introduction to this edition of "The Best and Brightest" had me excited anew for the passion, wisdom and erudition Halberstam brought to every writing project. The deep love of craft for writing is not lost on many people who pen (or type) words for a living, but I've not found many better expressions of it than here.

I'd like to share a few examples that had me feeling a whole lot better about what it is that I do, and how I would like to proceed, in my line of work. Halberstam remains a true inspiration as he explains how he came to the book idea, and to a life as an author:

"That had been a quantum leap not merely in terms of time and space, but, more important, in terms of freedom. . . . The only failings would be my own."

"It was, as much to my surprise as to [those of his friends], the easiest thing I had ever done. I had replaced the need for immediacy with the something far more powerful, an obsession. . . . I never regretted the deadlines, never missed the office."

"The great liberation for me was the ability to escape the limits of form. So it was that the interviews became more than mere source material, they became part of an education. . . . Now something more complicated was happening to me -- I was becoming caught up in the excitement of history, in the pull of the past."

"Writing the book was the most intellectually exciting quest of my life. Each day for the three and a half years the book took to write, I simply could not wait to get to work. Most journalists are impatient to get their legwork done and to start the actual writing, but I was caught up in something else, the actual doing."

And the last paragraph is the very best:

"The great pleasure for me was an inner pleasure: it was very simply the best I could do. In my own mind, I had reached above myself. There were no skills I possessed which were wasted, and there were skills which I found in doing it which I had never known of before, of patience and endurance. If a reporter's life is, at its best, an ongoing education, then this had been in the personal sense a stunning experience, and it had changed the way I looked not just at Vietnam, but at every other subject I took on from then on. I had loved working away from the pack, enjoyed the solitude of this more different, lonelier kind of journalism which I was now doing. I had gotten not just a book which I greatly valued from the experience, but a chance to grow."