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I was privileged to call Bernard Jay Paris my friend and colleague from the time I arrived at the University of Florida in 1992 until his death at the age of eighty-eight on November 7, 2019. From first to last, I always felt—knew—that he genuinely cared for and about me as a person. He showed me unfailing warmth and kindness that are all too rare anywhere, let alone in the academic world. We would have lunches together. I miss him immensely.
What I most deeply regret, however, is that I did not take the full measure of Bernie's greatness as a scholar during his lifetime. I had read with admiration his intellectual biography, Karen Horney: A Psychoanalyst's Search for Self-Understanding (1994a), chosen by The New York Times as a Notable Book of the Year; and it was because Heaven and Its Discontents: Milton's Characters in Paradise Lost (2010a) transformed my understanding of Milton's epic by showing the extent to which the character of God is portrayed as a narcissist and Heaven as a “glory system” that I dedicated the essay—originally published in American Imago (Rudnytsky, 2014)—that became the first chapter of my book Formulated Experiences (Rudnytsky, 2019) to Bernie. But only when I undertook to write this memorial tribute did I don my face mask and retrieve from my university office my collection of his sixteen authored and edited books, which, when I proceeded to burrow my way through them, bowled me over by the magnitude of his cumulative achievement.1
One of the most engaging features of Paris's writing is the openness with which he acknowledges the connections between his life and his work. It is a story he tells repeatedly, and it centers on his relationship to George Eliot, the subject of his first
book, Experiments in Life: George Eliot's Quest for Values (1965), and the lodestar of his scholarly preoccupations. Born and raised with his younger sister Hinda in Baltimore, Paris received both his undergraduate and graduate education at The Johns Hopkins