One summer, I was sitting by his pool in Ravello, working on a piece of fiction. I wondered aloud if it were possible to hold the reader's attention for about a dozen pages while my characters discussed Kierkegaard's Christian existentialism. I've also been much taken by Vidal's sense of a writer's obligation to society. People may disagree on what constitutes a pothole, but the fact is that writers do have a responsibility to their culture. They are, after all, its voice.
Art is still, as the ancients noted, a kind of mirror held up to the world.
I'm still learning from the example of these mentors, and from others, past and present. Of course, a writer's apprenticeship is never really finished. Jay Parini is a poet, novelist, and professor of English at Middlebury College. His novel The Apprentice Lover will be published next winter by HarperCollins.