And: “You have to trust your angels.”

And I recently learned, from an interview that he recorded for the National Holocaust Memorial Museum, that the proper pronunciation of his last name was not MEEK-us, as the people who didn’t know him said, or MECK-us, as those who considered ourselves in the know said, but MACK-us. Who knew?

Strange relationship. Somebody you know dies, you think about all your old conversations. What did you both say, really? But with Jonas all my conversations are recorded and transcribed, searchable. What did he say about wine? Oh, yeah, from an email dated Dec. 15, 2016:

“What keeps you young? they ask me. And I say, it’s wine, women and song. But at the same time I am a monk, I live like a monk.”

So his death is different. It’s not loss, because our conversations are still there; it’s a door closed on future gain — the talks we will not have, the guidance he will not give. The magnitude of this change is a measure of the man at 96.

We were not friends. Jonas had a close inner circle but was remarkable for being present to countless outer circles. On the other hand, he did not distinguish between work and life. I was documenting a part of his life that a real biographer would condense or skip, his life after he had done all the things that made him a subject for biography.

But what a life.

You see this photo?

Image Madame Blavatsky Credit... Corbis, via Getty Images

That’s Madame Blavatsky, the 19th-century Russian theosophist. Jonas brought out that photo in December 2017 to explain something: when he saw Greta Gerwig in New York magazine, he thought, aha, same person!