In pursuit of trunks and memorable writing, part 3

For those who read the posts on trunks (yesterday), here is a reprint of the elusive New Yorker article, dated February 13, 1978. I had clipped it and tucked it into the envelope with the note from the author:

(Talk of the Town) Notes and Comment

A letter from a friend home in bed with a cold [nc: authorship stated below]:
This bed is a real mess—mountains of Kleenex, mountains of newspapers. You might say that on an extremely small scale I am fighting for survival, striving to keep from sneezing my precious life away, but between seizures I glance at the papers—especially at stories about Cosmos 954, the Soviet nuclear-reactor satellite that blew a gasket and finally came to rest in the icy reaches of the Canadian north, spreading radioactive contamination over miles and miles—and I wonder if it is worthwhile to shake this cold. I mean, I’ll get over the cold, with aspirins, fluids, bed rest, and the holding of many beautiful thoughts, but I am gripped by the fact that the Soviet Union has at least ten nuclear powered orbs dancing around our skies and that the United States has nine. The newspapers are rather cozy about the matter, some stories saying that it will take six hundred years for one of the orbs to reenter the earth’s atmosphere, and only adding sotto voce that even then the enriched uranium would be extremely radioactive. Another story says that there is nothing to worry about for four hundred years. And another joyously speaks of four thousand years of grace. But aren’t all these figures—six hundred, four hundred, four thousand—mere blinks in the long history of the human race? If so, I’m wondering who gave anybody permission, either orally or in writing, to tamper with the existence of Man, much less set a theoretical cutoff date for worldwide contamination. One of the few things that have sustained me, through happy years and through sad ones, has been the thought that somewhere, sometime, a vigorous, intelligent, progressive, decent, perhaps freckled great-great-great-great-great-great-grandchild would put his or her shoulder to the wheel and roll the heavy stone one inch further up the hill. Have to stop now. Aspirin time.

The writer of this little piece (Philip Hamburger) went on (in the year 2000) to publish a book, about which the following is said:

Philip Hamburger joined the staff of The New Yorker in 1939 and hasn't stopped writing since. He has made something of a specialty of writing about presidential inaugurations, and in his new book, Matters of State: A Political Excursion, he collects ten of those pieces, covering the inaugural celebrations of presidents Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, Johnson, Nixon (both elections), Carter, Reagan (both elections), Bush, and Clinton. Published just as the nation's capital geared up for the first inauguration of the 21st century, Matters of State provided the perfect opportunity to revisit a perceptive observer's half century of quadrennial dispatches from inside the Beltway.