A Pause, for No Particular Reason

“You were living your life is what you were doing.” So a friend of mine replied when I asked rhetorically what I’d been doing one spring and where the time had gone.

Even before my overloaded computer crashed while I was out of town in early July and I stopped posting for a week or more, I had my friend’s insight in mind. I paused for no particular reason. Nothing was wrong. Nothing was lost. I was living my life is what I was doing.

It was a remarkable time to press pause. Ten Days in June, David Remnick called it, with the historic echoes fully intended and fully justified. What a June it was: the church shootings in Charleston; the Supreme Court’s rulings on same-sex marriage and lethal injection; the Greek debt crisis; the online return of Andrew Sullivan; the heat wave in Pakistan, the mayor-vs.-governor feud in New York, the manhunt upstate, and on and on – it was as consequential a month as any in memory.

In the pause – if that’s what it was – I was living my life: closing a magazine piece; seeing through a personal essay for the New Yorker website and a book review for the Times; planning a complex trip to France and Italy; watching NYCFC; reading Philip Glass’s autobiography and the Zaleskis’ new book about Lewis, Tolkien & Company and Thom Beller’s essay on Joseph Mitchell; meeting with colleagues in Washington, and on and on.

Hey, even Philip Glass, hardworking composer to beat all, spent twenty straight summers with his family in Nova Scotia.

Now – as swiftly as it crashed – the computer is restored; but I’ll likely be posting only intermittently while abroad. The main reason isn’t any aversion to writing while traveling. It’s that I’ve found the search for an internet connection comes to define travel more than I like. It’s that the fall will yield plenty to comment on, with Pope Francis’s visit right near the beginning. It’s that I hope to return having gained a firm toehold on a long piece of writing. It’s that I’ll be living my life.

10 July 2015
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