'You can hear them better at night'

From The New York Times?

By Apoorva Tadepalli

“My former boss and mentor, the writer ?{and editor} Lewis H. Lapham, is a great fan of communing with the dead.

{Lewis H. Lapham is the founder of Lapham’s Quarterly (laphamsquarterly.org ) and was the long-time editor of Harper’s Magazine.}

"‘You can hear them better at night,’ he advised during one of my first meetings with him. One of his favorite anecdotes is the story of the philosopher Niccolò Machiavelli in exile, working in a grove all day and then coming home and getting dressed in his best finery before entering his study to begin his nightly reading. Machiavelli wrote that he would ‘enter the ancient courts of ancient men,’ to ‘ask them the reason for their actions.”’

“Whenever I picture this beautiful scene, I see Machiavelli looking like Lewis Lapham, poring over his books, searching for guidance from previous eras on how to live in our own time.''

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