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I knew Ben Nelson for about forty years; I admired him enormously as a scholar; I treasured his friendship; and I am certain that all of you must have read of his departure from us with the same unbelieving sadness that my wife Lucia and I felt when we read that gloomy report in the Times. And yet how believable the setting of Ben's end was! He was traveling from one conference to another and that seems to have told the story of Ben's life. It was a searching journey from one conversation to another, from one academic subject to another, from one book to another, from one friend to another, all in the interest of learning and teaching.
Ben Nelson's teaching of his friends, colleagues, and students was suffused with a charming warmth and an endearing sweetness that made him lovable. He was neither soured nor daunted by moments of defeat nor was his face made long and narrow by the shrinking specialization that strikes so many scholars at some point in their lives. He pushed through or ran around the ends of conventional academic lines with the speed and power of a great running back. He loped from medieval studies to philosophy, from history to sociology, from sociology to psychology with ease and with purpose. And he did so in a manner that has virtually disappeared from humanistic studies today, when so many purveyors of empty concepts lack the percepts that the world or the printed page might afford them if they would only look or read, and when blind percept-mongers must feel their way unsteadily through history without any philosophical guidance.
Ben's vast range of interests did not spring from nowhere. Like so many young New Yorkers who came of intellectual age in the