Emerging from Barnes and Noble, I go with the stern injunction, ‘Enjoy your book!’ America is the land of the pronunciamento, in cultural as in other matters: those original Pilgrim proclaimers have been dab hands at disguising themselves, but everybody seems to love to speak in the injunctive. Shock-jock radio is at one end of a spectrum, presidential moral haughtiness at the other: but everybody has a pet called Ought around the place, and no day goes by without some emphatic cries from the creature. I am almost crestfallen when I do enjoy the book, rich in horrors though it be.

On the Metroliner from New York to Washington, a neighbour wields the March issue of Vogue, which seems to be the size of the Geelong telephone directory. It has some attention, is deserted for the purpose of reading a tale to a bulbous child and is left behind at journey’s end. Samuel Johnson expressed incredulity at the notion of ‘reading books through’ and would on that count at least be happy on the Metroliner: though the thrum of business being done on cell phones might leave him startled. Inspecting what passes for landscape, I am reminded of Woody Allen’s dictum that ‘God’s being pervades everything that is, with the exception of certain parts of New Jersey’. Vogue, even the phones, have their uses.

A man whom Johnson might well have liked is no more currently available than Johnson is – the poet Roland Flint. He died right at the beginning of the year at the age of sixty-six. I was one of many who like and admired him. He taught at Georgetown University for nearly thirty years; and when a memorial service was held for him there in mid-February, the sizeable chapel was completely filled. Family, colleagues and friends spoke, in an array of notes appropriate to so various a person. Flint fashioned a persona called ‘Pigeon’, stocky, an undergoer, often outfaced but never destroyed; and he practised poetry as if it were indeed a great, but greatly democratic, art. Contemporaries or elders like Anthony Hecht and Linda Pastan were there, as were many younger people who were in his debt.

Geoffrey Madan’s Notebooks have an entry that goes, ‘Amour. same meaning in Mongolian’. This is satisfactory, but my slender acquaintance with Mongolian suggests abundant differences after that. New York and Washington abound in bookstores, and when one wanders around in them it is a teasing question to ask whether the books are there mainly to establish parities, or disparities, or something else. Perhaps, like so much else in American life – I think of it as The Republic of Solitude – they are just there to be themselves with no entailments of any kind beyond that. Not, mind you, that this is the spirit of the public-radio authors’ interviews to which I listen; they are as steeped in courteous congratulation as Achilles was in his almost-efficacious fluid.

The crocus is making its bid, next to the holly-bushes, and the snow is quitting in the interests of rain -which makes it easier for the genuinely powerful to jog the streets of Georgetown with their quartets of bodyguards. This side of town one need never hear a gunshot, which couldn’t be said of territories within an easy lope of the Capitol, but power and peril seem never to be far from the mind, however benign the surroundings. The Company Town of Worldly Omnipotence keeps on producing column-inches, and slab-thick histories and fictions, about just that matter. Down the hill from the university is a bridge named after Francis Scott Key, who gave us ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’. The standard came before the poem but, after lengthy exposure to things American, one might suppose the two perfectly fused. More than the Declaration of Independence, more than the Gettysburg Address, this is the catechetical document of contemporary America. It is the shortest epic I know, and it does not look like disappearing.