Joseph Epstein -- the man who wrote the Dr. Biden piece in the Wall Street Journal, which I refuse to share -- was my professor at Northwestern. He taught me more about writing clear prose than any other teacher I ever had, and I'm grateful for everything I learned from him.

What he's teaching me now, sadly, is that his capacity for meaningful literary work has diminished immensely in the three-plus decades since I last sat in his classroom. He was always a bit of a crusty conservative, and he has become more and more reactionary over the years...

...but he used to have an ability to ennoble his subjects and, in so doing, to enrich his readers. He now seems to have lost that ability.

What I find troubling is that a person who has read more widely and deeply than anyone I believe I have ever known has somehow been unable to develop the necessary empathy and understanding that would have surely made a piece like this impossible to write...

... and that also should have made the thoughts embedded in it impossible to think. How has literature so completely failed him in his 80-some years of reading? I would like to believe that such a catastrophe wasn't possible, but it clearly is.

A final thought: one of the things I've always admired most about Epstein is that he's an autodidact. He studied at the University of Chicago, as he has written about extensively, but his training as a writer and a teacher was mostly of the on-the-job variety.

I have always admired his self-determination in that regard. Now, however I find myself thinking that maybe he just wasn't up to the immense intellectual rigor required to earn a doctorate.

Perhaps this failed attempt to take Dr. Biden down a peg stems from his own insecurities as an academic.

If so, Kiddo, that's terribly sad.