Lewis Mumford was one of the seminal thinkers of the twentieth century. He was among the first to recognize the importance of human scale in towns and cities and to argue the need for spiritual values in the face of the increasing commercialization of modern culture. This is a moving account of the closing phase of his life.

Could this be Lewis Mumford, I wondered, the eminent social philosopher, who I knew had been living in Amenia for decades? I had been casting about for a way to augment my meager income as an independent filmmaker, so I called the number, and my hunch was correct. A cultivated, older woman's voice answered: "Sophia Mumford."

"Hold on a moment, please, while I go to the other phone," she said. Even though there was little left of one of the greatest minds of the twentieth century, her husband didn't like to hear himself talked about. Mrs Mumford explained that she was looking for someone who could guide her husband from the kitchen chair to his bed at bedtime "because Lewis can't stand to be handled."

I explained that I had a family and my own career and wasn't available for steady weekend duty. We left it that she would call me if she needed a substitute for the night attendant. "Lewis is a sketch of his former self," she explained, "but the essence of his being is still there." She invited me to come right over, and I drove the few miles through the rapidly suburbanizing dairy farm country of northern Dutchess County, until I came to an unprepossessing, white-clapboard farmhouse right on the road, to which little had been done since it was built in the early 1800s.

It was a bleak November day, and the once-elaborate landscaping around the house was a neglected tangle. "We haven't been able to garden since Lewis went downhill four years ago," Mrs Mumford explained as she led me through the kitchen, supporting herself on a walker. With a no-nonsense straight-banged haircut and a figure that her husband had described years earlier as "like the Nike of Samothrace, but better" she seemed younger and more vigorous then her ninety years. She had all her marbles, and then some. Mumford - a bald, distinguished-looking, aquiline-profiled ninety-four-year-old with a thin mustache - was sitting at the kitchen table and staring out the window. Before him lay an open National Geographic. He could still look at pictures. I timidly pressed his hand and introduced myself. There was a nod and a flicker of acknowledgment.

Two weeks later I had almost forgotten my encounter with the old couple, when Mrs Mumford called me with an urgent tone in her voice, asking if I could come over immediately. She was alone and needed help.

I found them, as I had left them, in the kitchen. Sophia was trying to get him to bed. Leaning over her walker and peering into his face, Mrs Mumford said, "Come on, darling you must get up. On the count of three look into my eyes and stand up." Mumford grinned at her and thumbed his nose but stubbornly refused to try to get up from his chair. I realized how difficult it must have been for her to have gone through the degeneration of her brilliant husband of nearly seventy years into a mischievous prankster. I coaxed him into cooperating by reciting an anonymous poem:

For Age is Opportunity

No less than Youth itself

And as the evening Twilight

Fades away

The Sky is filled with stars

Invisible by Day.

Mumford's eyes twinkled with what seemed to be appreciation, and he lifted himself up on the next count of three and shuffled along on his walker behind Sophia, on hers. The bedtime train, I called it.

After we got him to bed we stayed up and talked about Donald Miller's recently-published biography of Mumford. Sophia - as she insisted I call her - was disturbed by the fact that Miller, a "cold academic" as Mumford had described him, had not shown her the personal sections of the biography as he had promised. She seemed less disturbed by the lurid detail with which he recreated episodes in the Mumfords personal lives, than by the interpretations he ascribed to them, portraying Sophia as the put-upon and patient Griselda, when in fact theirs had been for seven decades an open relationship in which there were no secrets or constraints, and every new development was admitted, discussed, and if perhaps agonized over, finally accepted. Sophia told me that at one point, while writing his autobiography and discussing the role of the other women in his life, Mumford had offered to throw the whole thing into the fire, an offer she rejected. Her creed (as quoted in the "Amor Threatening" chapter of Works and Days, one of three autobiographic volumes), was: "Looking back on our life, I'd have nothing changed, if I could live it over again, except our Geddes's death and whatever in the world's affairs and in our lives made Alison's childhood tense and difficult. But I could accept you having been in love with other women. I don't believe a blameless life is a good life."

She told me how it had been easier to accept the affairs since she actually liked the other women, particularly Catherine Bauer, and respected their minds and thought them worthy of Mumford's interest. In spite of Mumford's active extra-curricular love-life, which resulted in his declaration at one point that he was intellectually in love with Catherine, spiritually in love with Josephine, and domestically in love with Sophia, he proclaimed that Sophia was the "Winged Victory who proudly stands above them all" in the "Westminster Abbey" of his love and that his marriage with her exerted "a gravitational pull that no passing comet could overcome." During my first night in their home I could palpably feel the warmth and love that had held them together all those years.

I was fascinated by Sophia's descriptions of their life together in the twenties: "Ours was the serious group downtown. The wives mostly worked, while the men, who had yet to become successful as writers or painters, stayed at home. We were never part of the chic Vanity Fair Algonquin Round Table group. We accepted poverty as a natural way of life."

I was intrigued by the simplicity and order of their home, particularly Sophia's organization of the old-fashioned pantry, which had scores of jars, each one labeled: oatmeal, orzo, orris, arrowroot.

"After we had the children, one of us would go upstairs and put them to bed, and the other would stay and do the dishes. Then, as we dried the dishes together, we would talk. Lewis saw through Communism early, although he was at heart a Socialist. I was more sympathetic and said, 'Give them more time.' Lewis always believed it most important to combat evil. He took the unpopular position in the late thirties that we should participate in World War 2, and was later disillusioned when we emerged from the war not cleansed, but infected by the same virus - the need for more power and money."

A few days later she asked me to come and sit with her husband five nights a week. As he lay sleeping under an orange-and-brown afghan throw, I sat near him in a reclining chair, dozing off when I could. His ancient face had an air of nobility and clarity about it. There was a faded Tibetan thanka, a sacred painting, of Chenresig, the Bodhisattva of Compassion at the head of his bed, and another one of Shakyamuni Buddha on the wall at his feet. Sophia called them "reassuring presences". Three of the bedroom walls were lined with books. The one closest to me contained his life work - various editions of the some thirty odd books he had written. Of course I knew who Lewis Mumford was, but I had never actually read anything that he had written. As I browsed in his books I began to realize that he was the father of everything my generation had believed in during the sixties: ecological and human balance in the midst of unrestrained technology and materialism; a world view that restored human dignity and creativity to bureaucratic social structures; returning architecture and life itself to a "human scale". I discovered that he had helped organize the country's first nuclear disarmament program, that he had actively opposed the government's involvement in Vietnam, and that his writings had presaged the environmental movement.

A few nights later, the moon was full, and Sophia warned me that her husband often became very talkative at that time. As I sat with him that evening he kept calling out to me: "Do you need anything? Is there anything I can do for you? Are you warm? Did you have anything to drink? Do you need anything to eat?" Then he asked, "Have you any brains?" "I hope so," I replied.

He continued to talk feverishly, questing after new ideas and insights about what his next "work" should be: "Have you any ideas about the work?" he asked. He seemed to be passing into a place where concern for others was more vivid than the images of visible "reality". I was amazed by the intensity of his words. It was as if his mind was skipping but still powerful enough to come out every now and then with a potent insight. He seemed frustrated by his inability to express all that he was experiencing. "I feel very weak. I don't think what I've written has given us all we need to make the transition to a higher place." He spoke animatedly about "the people, the workers," and kept referring to the importance of "small groups gathering and creating help for us all. We need smaller groups now. That's all I can talk of and it's not nearly enough...Hope a new class of people who will know what's necessary...It's these small groups of people who will lead in the eventual help...people who will be able to make the change to a higher place...their small risks will become a law."

The next night when I showed Sophia his ramblings, which I had jotted down, she said that he had spoken of these "small groups" before. Their daughter, Alison, told me that some months earlier Mumford had kept asking Sophia to take him out to these "small groups". Perhaps these words were nothing more than senile babble, or perhaps, as Lao Tzu has written, when an extremely old man starts to fade away, he comes into contact "with life in its highest form...at that age a man may free himself from his body and become a holy being." The possibility of such liberation was something that intrigued Albert Einstein as well. "A human being is part of a whole, called by us 'universe', a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separate from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of poison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature."

Later than night, while trying to help Mumford get to sleep, there was a communion between us during which I felt as if I had become the embodiment of all the women he had ever known. LM: "I want you to forgive me for I have done all that I can."

"Of course I do, Lewis," LM: "I love you and thank you." "I do too, Lewis." LM: "Is there anything more I can do for you?" "Just relax and go to sleep." LM: "May I kiss you?"

I let him kiss my cheek and I stroked his forehead. He clasped my hand and reiterated his gratitude. As he finally dropped off to sleep I whispered an ancient Celtic incantation: "Deep peace of the running way to you, deep peace of the silent stars, deep peace of the flowing air to you, deep peace of the quiet earth, may peace, may peace, may peace fill your soul, let peace, let peace, let peace make you whole."

On Christmas Eve I couldn't come until after ten. Mumford was restless again. His right hand was tracing broad strokes in the air, as if he were painting or sketching. He had been quite an accomplished watercolorist and self-portraits, cityscapes, and lush green vistas of the rolling countryside around Amenia were hanging throughout the house.

"Can I leave now?" he kept asking, and kept trying to get out of bed. It reminded me of something Sophia had said about wishing she could just take him through a "door" out of this life and into the next. He seemed to be struggling, as Natasha puts it in War and Peace, to "cast off the corporal husk."

I told him a fable about a caterpillar on an oriental carpet that my great uncle had made up. As the caterpillar crawled through each color that made up the carpet's design, he was overwhelmed by the color's intensity. In the blue, he felt blue, in the yellow he felt bright and well again, in the vermilion he was consumed with passion, until he was so exhausted by all the chro- matic and emotional transitions that he finally fell asleep. When he awakened, he was aware of a change: he took a look at himself and wonder of wonders, he had become a butterfly. Slowly lifting off with his new wings, he looked down at the carpet and saw that all the different colors were part of a tapestry and fit together magnificently, as one great whole.

The strange twilight relationship that I shared with Lewis Mumford during his last days seemed to affect him, too, even though he didn't really know who I was. The night before my last with him, five days before he died, there was a huge snowstorm and it was late morning before his day companion could get there. I stayed and made breakfast for Sophia and we chatted while her husband slept. During those last days he didn't wake up until afternoon and then went to bed again at 7:30pm.

When I came in again (early) later that day to avoid another impending snowstorm, Mumford's weekend companion, Robin, was excited because she said that he had spoken animatedly to her all afternoon about the need "to protect a certain woman." He was very concerned about everyone's responsibility to take care of this "necessary women" and made Robin promise she would do what she could to protect the woman, too, because the woman was so "vulnerable."

That night I picked an anthology of his essays, Interpretations and Forecasts, and read the following commentary about Henry Adams's address to the Virgin:

"Henry Adams, who sensed so many important transformations that he could not prove, was wise enough to seek, as a corrective to the large-scale perversion of life that was already taking place, the help of a woman. He saw that we needed not more information, more statistical data...more exact knowledge; our society was already burdened with larger quantities of power, under these heads, than we could ever made use of, without a profound change in our whole attitude toward human existence. Adams saw that we needed more feeling, feeling and gentling such as infants first get at their mothers' breasts: such feeling as women symbolically embodied and projected from the Paleolithic Venus of Wilmersdorf to the Venus of Milo; from Egyptian Isis to the Virgin of the Thirteenth Century: feeling that has poured into a thousand benign cultural forms, pictorial, musical, architectural and expressed itself in every sustaining mode of embrace...from the kiss of greeting to the hot tears with which we take our leave from the dead."

In my last few days with Mumford he became weaker and weaker and refused to eat and drink. Both he and Sophia seemed to gently withdraw from each other. On the last night I spent with him the only words he uttered were incoherent phrases: "bands of light", "the essence of being", and something about spring. At 4pm, Friday, January 26th, he died quietly during his afternoon nap. When Dick Coons, his most beloved and constant companion, called to tell me of his death, I did not immediately feel sad. I felt that in his final moments Mumford had embodied his own words about Ralph Waldo Emerson: "No one could have met the disturbance of senescence with more smiling resignation...like a winter apple, still ruddy, though mealy-ripe, he clung to the tree, safe from the worms and the wasps. When his thoughts no longer made sense, he had the sense to remain silent. But the halo remained gay and bright; and today, against the addled counsels, the insensate threats, the artful, self-induced psychoses of our age, that halo has become gayer and brighter than ever, for it radiated from a poised and finely balanced personality."