Gordon Wood’s Proust

I never knew Gordon Wood well, or at all. During college, I was assigned The Radicalism of the American Revolution in an entry-level history class, like millions of other students. And of course I remember Wood’s name from the barroom scene in Good Will Hunting, where Matt Damon makes a self-important yuppie look like an idiot, a setup that apparently amused Wood greatly. But when I saw today that the ninety-two-year-old historian had been struck and killed by a car in Providence, Rhode Island, my mind was immediately transported to the single time that I met him, one of the only events in my adult life that I would actually call inspiring.