I recently came across a paragraph by Proust that begins: "When from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered..." and I thought of Vivianne Hermann. Holocaust survivor, sculptor and teacher. Not long before Vivianne died she told me she was re-reading Proust, "amid the ruins of all the rest."

I've written, "My dead friends keep me alive." So tonight I will host their stellar spirits. Like Po Chü-i and his departed friends, we'll recall the times we spent together, brag about our accomplishments, and drink to the folly of our lives.