A Month in the Country

Author — J. L. Carr
Finished — 2025-01-05
Started — 2024-12-30

There are some mysterious items on my OmniFocus project “Books to Read v9”. Usually I try to capture where I got a recommendation and why it stuck enough for me to record it. This one was just there, and when I looked at it I got a vague sense that whoever had recommended it had made it sound meditative and nourishing.

On a rare visit to California for work, I discovered the utopian Kepler’s Books, which felt like it belonged in a hip urban center, not a dismal walk down the unwalkable American street from my suburban hotel. There I spent an agonizing amount of time wandering from section to section, squinting at every recommendation card, trying to look like I needed a staff member to ask, “Is there anything I can help you find?” But I was too exhausted from travel and emotionally raw to approach someone myself, and unsure what question I would even ask. In the end I picked out this book and Thiese’s Notes on Complexity, all on my own.

I made some of my most vivid and satisfying reading memories carrying this around under my arm, sneaking pages whenever I could. On a trip to the publicly-owned lodging in Nikkou, maintained for residents of Tokyo’s Katsushika ward. At a tsukemen joint around the corner. At my in-laws’ creaky four-story house, about as old as me.

“Look, how many times have I to tell you I’m not an artist. I’m the laborer who cleans up after artists. And my coat doesn’t signify a thing: I wear it because I feel the cold round my ankles like other people feel it round their ears.”

From their accounts and from judicious pumping, their mother worked out how it was with me and usually sent a bit of whatever was being manufactured in her kitchen—rabbit pie, a couple of currant teacakes, two or three curd tarts. So, over the weeks, a splendid repertory of North Riding dishes was performed amanti bravura to an applauding Londoner, dishes Mrs. Ellerbeck had helped her mother bake, who had helped her mother bake who … Sometimes I’d share this bounty with Moon and it was he who suggested that we were eating disposable archaeology.

His hands talk like monks’ hands must have talked in the long silences

You can only have this piece of cake once; you can’t keep on munching away at it. Sad, but there it is! You’ll find that, once you’ve dragged yourself off round the corner, there’ll be another view; it may even be a better one.”