I think often of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Crack-Up, with its opening salvo of nonchalance and pure haunt. It is a useful reminder of how, no matter one’s levels of self-awareness, revelations will lag:
Hug the Tree; Shoot the Messenger
Environmentalism and the pitfalls of doomsday rhetoric
Spring in Washington is a beautiful book. So much so that it sounds positively hokey to the modern ear. Today’s reader might be challenged to sit-straight faced through passages like this, about the sheer glory of the cherry blossoms’ annual performance in the capital’s Tidal Basin: