Style, Russian Short Stories, and "Wine's Litigious Imperatives" (not about the Estonian vodka pipeline)

I've already blogged today about revisiting the books of one's childhood, but if you thought that meant you were finished reading about reading, you need to study harder before the exam. As nice as it is to return to books that have mattered, it's even nicer to rediscover a book (or, in this case, an essay) that made a deep impression and then had to be returned to the library (what actually happened), or given back to its lender (plausible), or thrown in the trash after being left in the rain (I miss you, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure). My memory of this William F. Buckley passage was frustratingly imperfect, but that matters less now that I have my own copy (via Paperback Swap):

. . . a story I read sometime during my teens was about a very rich young prince who one evening engaged in a drinking bout of Brobdingnagian dimensions with his fellow bloods, which eventually peaked, as such affairs frequently did in that curious epoch of genius and debauchery, in a philosophical argument over the limits of human self-control. The question was specifically posed: Could someone succeed in voluntarily sequestering himself in a small suite of rooms for a period of twenty years, notwithstanding that he would always be free to open the door, letting himself out, or others in? In a spirit of high and exhibitionistic dogmatism, the prince pronounced such hypothetical discipline preposterous, and announced that he would give one million rubles to anyone who succeeded in proving him wrong.

You will have guessed that a young companion, noble but poor, and himself far gone in wine's litigious imperatives, accepted the challenge. And so with much fanfare, a few days later, the rules having been carefully set (he could ask for, and receive, anything except human company), Peter (we'll call him) was ushered into the little subterranean suite of room in the basement of the prince's house.

During the first years, he drank. During the next years, he stared at the ceiling. During the succeeding years, he read--ordering books, more books, and more books. Meanwhile the fortunes of the prince had taken a disastrous turn, and so he schemed actively to seduce Peter to leave his self-imposed confinement, dispatching letters below, describing evocatively the sensual delights Peter would experience by merely opening the door. In desperation, as the deadline neared, he even offered one half the premium.

The night before the twentieth year would finish at midnight, half the town and thousands from all over Russia were outside to celebrate and marvel over the endurance of Peter upon his emergence. One hour before midnight, the startled crowd saw the celebrated door below street level open prematurely. And Peter emerge. He had, you see, become a philosopher; and in all literature I know of no more eloquent gesture of disdain for money. One hour more, and he'd have earned a million rubles. What style, you say, and I concur.

But what is it about that one hour that speaks so stylishly, in a sense that Peter's emergence one year before the deadline would not, lacking as one year would be in drama; or, at the other end, one minute before midnight, one minute being overfreighted in melodrama? It is style, surely.

I received the anthology that contains this long-lost passage three hours before running into an old friend from high school who, as it happens, also lives in Brooklyn. I don't know what my guardian angel thinks he's doing; I didn't ring any bells.