For some years I was a member of an awards committee at the American Academy, chaired initially by John Cheever. I was the newest, youngest member and my experience of the sometimes contentious, more often agreeable and illuminating meetings, with their exacting discussion and analysis of books, was very intense..

The committee met for a morning's discussion, with a luncheon interlude, several times a year, in the elegant American Academy of Arts and Letters building on 155 Street, Manhattan.

My dream was of one of these meetings, so vividly 'real' I could not have had any sense that things were other than authentic: John Updike, John Hollander, May Swenson, Hortense Calisher, John Cheever, and me, seated around our polished mahogany table, as usual deeply involved in our mission of doling out many thousands of dollars to writers (well-established writers, neglected writers, emerging writers, newly published writers, deserving writers of all types and ranks), when my attention was drawn to swirling mists or fog outside our tall, second-floor windows, and I became aware by degrees that something was wrong, something was terribly wrong.

The others may have continued talking, but I was overwhelmed by a sense of horror, for outside the windows of the American Academy there was, suddenly, nothing--the very world had disappeared, there had been a total ecological collapse.

What could our committee of writers do but continue discussing 'literary awards' in the face of oblivion?

SOURCE: The Tiger Garden: A Book of Writers' Dreams by Nicholas Royle, 1996, p.184-5. DATE: Wikipedia lists Oates as an American Academy member in 1978, but lacks a closing date; she says "several years" on the committee, so the dream could be a few years later. TITLE: added to aid searches; original untitled.

EDITOR'S NOTE

Whatever the exact date, it was early to be dreaming of total ecological collapse outside your window. Prescient--for then. Now it seems ordinary. But then, we don't need to dream it. Just look outside.

--Chris Wayan

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