The image above is not an illusion. It is an autograph from Lewis Henry Lapham, the legendary editor of Harper's magazine. This autograph is 100% authentic, and it was obtained by me about six weeks ago, after considerable effort.

Circumstances: I attended a panel discussion called The Monk and the Philosopher on the Berkeley campus. The panel - built around the French philosopher Jean Francois Revel and his son, the Buddhist monk Matthieu Ricard - was convened to discuss the nature of religion, belief, spiritualism, etc. in the modern world. You can imagine how painful the Q&A period was, as various California flakes put long, meandering questions to the stellar panelists.

No matter. We were there for the all-star panelists. Representing the atheist perspective was none other than Christopher Hitchens, fresh off his Blumenthal dust-up and winning the crowd easily with his acidic wit. Our group had come to see Hitchens in fighting trim, and we weren't disappointed.

Of course, the people I was with urged me to go over and score some of my own browny points with the Big Man. And of course, I considered it. But did I really want to spoil my meeting with a Master by exuding that mortal odor of inept self-promotion ("I, um, write a lot of stuff on the Web, but I really feel I'm more of a magazine journalism type")? If I wanted to approach with honor a man of Lewis Lapham's caliber, it would have to be through an autograph request - the one form of supplication so abstracted as to become a kind of commerce in niceties.

Our most acute doubts yield our most elegant solutions. I settled on the Spartan, Best, Lewis H. Lapham - no pretense, no importunate coziness, just a token of respect between two old pros. And there, on a temperate East Bay evening, with an extinguished cigarette butt still perched in his teeth, Lewis Lapham dashed off his modest envoie to Tim Cavanaugh.

Heavy pen pressure indicates deep-seated emotions, passion, and the tendency to hold onto emotional garbage much too long. His best trait is "persistence".. this guy never gives up. And I have to give him high marks on the intelligence scale; smooth talker, quick mind, analytical, aloof. Cool cat with a sharp toungue. But don't try and convince him of the coming of the Lord. I don't know what he believes in, but his mind is made already up.

I must stress again that Bart had no coaching from me on this signature. Yet, just as he did the last time I asked him for analysis, Bart immediately grasped the individual personality, and even introduced that unsolicited line about the coming of the Lord. Just by looking at the signature, Bart detected the spiritual residue that Lapham was still showing from the heady religious talk he had been listening to moments earlier. Even I couldn't detect that, and I was there!

All in all, I couldn't have been happier with my autograph score. My only moment of esprit d'escalier came when I thought back to that extinguished cigarette butt. As it happened, I had a bag of Drum tobacco in my pocket. What if, instead of standing there like a galoot while he signed his name, I had rolled up a fresh cigarette in a jiffy, and offered it to Lapham? What an icebreaker! Lapham and I would have been smoking pals!

But it's probably best I kept my goals limited. Lapham might have been put off by the hand-rolled cigarette. He might have found my feverish rolling ennervating, or thought it creepy that I was so solicitous. Better to walk away with the quiet satisfaction that can only come from passing a happy moment with Harper's editor Lewis Henry Lapham.