May 14, 1995

Special Today: The Sophisticated Traveler Magazine Part 2 Special Today: Summer Arts Arts and Leisure, section 2

In the airy sitting room of the ranch house where he has lived for 48 years, Byron Nelson holds a picture in his gnarled hands and peers back through time. In the frame, a lean young man is in the perfect golf position, his arms extended and the shaft of his club bowed, head behind the ball, body in absolute balance. Nelson's gaze lingers on the frame, and the deep lines of his face are reflected in the glass. He is the man with the tie and the starched shirt in the old black-and-white photo, swinging with a tensile strength that fairly leaps through the decades and out of the picture; he is the man with the bad hip sitting with his cane at arm's length. He shakes his head slowly, puts a finger to his lips and smiles.

Senator Bob Dole, master legislator, has in recent days looked like anything but. Republicans on Capitol Hill, saying he overreached on a legal reform bill, zigzagged over the nomination of Dr. Henry W. Foster Jr. as Surgeon General and oddly timed his championing of a measure to move the United States Embassy in Israel, have started wondering whether after three decades in Washington, Mr. Dole, the majority leader, has lost his touch, or at least lost touch with his colleagues.

THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES By Robert Musil. Translated by Sophie Wilkins and Burton Pike. Two volumes, boxed. 1,774 pp. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. $60.

FROM the outside and in, First Church in Windsor, United Church of Christ, looks like a lot of other New England churches: an old white clapboard building anchored near the center of town and a congregation characterized more by ordinariness than anything else. The Congregational church was just the sort of thing Gary Dorsey was looking for when he decided to return to religion after a 20-year absence, not so much as a spiritual pilgrim but as a journalist interested in the mysteries of church life and what kept people glued together in such a community. His findings are chronicled in "Congregation: The Journey Back to Church," published last month by Viking.