My very healthy father died unexpectedly at Thanksgiving in 2023. In what turned out to be the last 3 1/2 years of his life, he and I went on a lot of hikes. My parents lived close to the Northwest Branch of the Anacostia River, and, in the times of pandemic lockdown, it was a good place to get outside. It was close by, quiet, and not crowded.
I went back to our favorite trailhead for the first time on a sunny, windy Sunday in March 2024. (Once or twice there was another car there and my dad would joke about whether we’d be able to find a spot.) We walked this stretch of trail over and over, and watched it change.
During one of the pandemic winters, there was a big winter storm and some trees fell, and other trees and debris got stuck in them, and the stream found a way around, cutting farther into the bank, pushing into the broad sandy flat at the bottom of the ravine. After a heavy rain the banks would crumble more and more trees would lose their grip on the sandy soil. Every time we went, it had changed.
I cried that day in March, nearly two years ago now, because my dad wasn’t there to see the changes in the log jam. It was even wider. Even more trees had fallen in.
Now it’s probably been a year since I’ve been to visit the log jam myself. Who knows what has changed since then. Somehow, the world keeps going without us.
Dreading the coming face-plant into January? I am. Cold, dark mornings followed by cold, dark evenings, chintzy decor strung up well past its prime, dirty snow (if any snow at all) heaped under dreary parking lot lighting, long gift-return lines. Nature brown and bare.
Plus, the state of the world. THE STATE OF THE WORLD. The season of long, sunny days can’t get here fast enough.
Until then, one must seek escape. Like many, I am prone to look for it where it’s most readily available. You know the place.
Which leads me to ask, why do rug-cleaning videos on TikTok make me feel a little bit better about the ugly season, the general state of things? Maybe you’ve seen them, usually posted by cleaning companies to drum up business. They go like this: A man (it’s always a man) in black rubber boots unrolls a dirty carpet onto a concrete floor in some warehouse, and the thing is not just dirty but DIRTY, embedded with filth like it’s been marinating in crude oil and sewage in an underground pit for decades. But this is a story of hope, so the man wields a carpet cleaning wand and assorted spinning brushes and bottles of blue soap and a hose and a squeegee. At 3X speed we get to watch him soap up, scrub, rinse, and squeegee the thing over and over, the water starting out mud black and gloopy and ultimately running sudsy white and then crystal clear. The colors and design of the rug slowly appear as when someone peels back old carpet to find gorgeous tile underneath. In the end, the rug looks light, fresh, and new.
Lest you think that only old books can be bothered to note the fonts in which they’re printed, the latest (Sep., 2025) Thursday Murder Club’s opening pages say it’s set in Adobe Jenson Pro, which has been designed by Cassandra Garruzzo Mueller, bless her.
And in the spirit of font-noting if not the letter, J.L. Carr’s splendid books open with an ode to the printing office, “the Crossroads of Civilization, Refuge of all the Arts against the Ravages of Time. From this place Words may fly abroad not to perish as Waves of Sound but fix’d in Time, not corrupted by the Hurrying Hand but verified in Proof. Friend, you are on Safe Ground. This is a Printing Office.”
I think what they’re all getting at is, after some public person wrote this book and some less visible person edited it, some completely invisible person put together the physical book. This latter person did the book carefully and lovingly, and here presents it to you, and hopes you like it.
This first ran December 13, 2019.
You finish the book, you don’t want it to be over with, there’s still one more printed page, so you read it. “A Note on the Type,” it says, and heads off into the highest weeds: the name of the font in which the book is printed, then the font’s forebears, its continuing history, its inventor, its inventor’s history, and sometimes its virtues. This is blindingly irrelevant, unsatisfying, and irritating, and so on purpose I never read it.
Until the book I just finished, Imogen Gower’s The Mermaid and Mrs. Hancock, when I hit the “Note on the Type” page and kept on reading:
This book is set in Caslon, a typeface named after Willliam Caslon (1692-1766).
Aaaand it just goes on from there, the better part of a page. The voice was slightly prissy and assumed I wanted to know a great deal about the William Caslon and his adventures in, as it said, “typefounding.” Caslon founded a family of typefounders but before that, he was apprenticed to an engraver of gunlocks (and of course gun barrels too) in London, then opened his own shop for silver chasing. I don’t know the meanings of: typefounding, gunlock, silver chasing, and a part I left out, bookbinders’ stamps. Caslon’s skill in cutting letters – I don’t know what that is either – attracted two printers whose names I’ll furnish if you need me to and who backed him to buy typefounding equipment. The fonts Caslon cut for a folio edition of John Selden – of whom I’ve never heard – “excited great interest” and thereafter Caslon just went from strength to strength. His font has many virtues, each ennumerated, and its “general effect is clear and open but not weak or delicate.”
WHY is this interesting? WHY? And who thinks I want to know? And who in the name of the sweet baby Jesus writes these things?
The writer Tom Stoppard died on November 29. We’re re-posting this essay (which originally appeared on June 10, 2011) in his honor. The references to dates (e.g., “A few months ago”) remain as in the original post.
The 16-year-old student has an idea, but she doesn’t have the maths to support it. She does, however, have a drawing. She submits it to her tutor. He examines it, then delivers his verdict.
“This is not science,” he says. “This is story-telling.”
The scene is from Tom Stoppard’s play Arcadia. The setting is an English country house in 1812. The student has been wondering why a steam engine can not re-energize itself forever, and she believes she has arrived at the answer: heat loss. And, yes, she understands the implications of a physics whose arrow of time goes in only one direction.
“So the Improved Newtonian Universe must cease and grow cold,” her tutor says. By “Newtonian universe” he means not just the cosmos but the whole clockwork kit and caboodle.
I had an ephiphany about why cats are the way they are. But before I can explain the epiphany, I should explain the way that cats are. Granted, I don’t have a cat, but I was raised with them. I lived on a small farm and farms have cats to keep the mice and rats down. The cats themselves lived in a kind of roving population, the females and babies staying pretty close to the outbuildings, the males wandering around doing what they do, and in short a farm can have several litters of babies a year who you won’t know about before you fall over them in the barn. The net numbers of cats were generally controlled by the wandering males and by the likes of my mother, and I’m not going to talk about their methods.
Never mind. The point is, I have many data points about cats so I can generalize. Cats are not your friends. They not only don’t listen to you, they don’t care what you say. They love you while they’re with you and when they want something, but honest? they don’t love you at all. The relationship is not even transactional, they’re all take and no give, it is all on their terms. They go about their own lives and business without regard for you or for the social good, and that is the reason Rudyard Kipling titled his story The Cat That Walked By Himself. They are so focused on themselves as to be psychopaths. They switch easily between friendly and feral and thus survive easily without us. They’re killers, not killers-in-groups, but killers all by themselves and they don’t necessarily kill to eat.
For further data, I also called upon my neighbors who have had many cats over many years. It’s true that a lot of their data points are irrelevant to my epiphany (which I haven’t yet explained). However, their data mainly suggest that cats like to sit in or on things. They offer many photos, 1700 in fact. I include some of those photos here in case they’re relevant after all. For instance, one possibility is that cats sit in or on things as practice for lurking invisibly before seizing upon their prey. Some photos back this possibility, some do not.
Autumn always makes the woods feel empty Though I know strictly speaking This isn’t true
Bears prowl orchards Chuff through oak groves Stuff themselves before a slumber That grows shorter every year Deer, too, are bolder now and dumber Haunting the edges of highways Running to or from the rut Even many insects remain Hidden in soil or bark Unnamed under leaves Or within the spongy corpses Of bug-killed trees
And yet still the woods seem empty Something many things are missing Now running water rings clearer A cold mineral sound While the squirrels get louder In their rooting and hoarding They rustle in the duff like monks Turning pages in a library
I’ve heard squirrels lose Most of their buried acorns Just forget where they put them Like me with the keys the phone The summer Where did it go All that heat and light Wasted
The difference between us is Squirrels by forgetting seed the future While I accomplish nothing Lose entire seasons Can’t remember year to year That if the woods are empty Autumn isn’t the problem
“I put my pants on just like the rest of you—one leg at a time. Except, once my pants are on, I make gold records.”
Christopher Walken as The Bruce Dickinson, SNL “More Cowbell” sketch
Margaret Atwood (Peggy in her personal life) resisted writing her memoirs because she thought her life was not interesting. She was right. Like most great writers, the vast majority of Atwood’s adult life has been spent at a desk. Like most ultra-successful careerpersons, she calls herself a workaholic.
Of course, now that she has bowed to the pressure to write her memoirs in her late 80s, joking that it gave her a chance to get back at her enemies, they are a pleasure to read. I would read an Atwood book about electrical wiring and enjoy it. The audiobook version narrated by the author adds a deadpan delivery that sparks delight.
But if a biography (whether auto- or allo-) recounts the life and times of its subject, the times are more riveting here than the life. Wartime backwoods Canada is just close enough to my own family’s experience that I catch most of her references, but they are certainly a throwback. The way of life in which you must can your own food and sew your own clothes has few comparables now. Even without Atwood’s frequent signposting, it’s not hard to see this girl as the mother of the offbeat, principled, fearlessly frank woman.
