The next vanishing act was the heretofore highly anticipated books that always sat at my bedside waiting to be read. In their place in the final minutes of my day came the last emails, so that I could sleep feeling “virtuous,” instead of comforted by a reflection of Marcus Aurelius or stilled by reading the books of Kent Haruf or Wendell Berry, in which little happens, save for the recollected insights of people who are guided by the earth’s rhythms, human love, and tested virtue and whose observations quiet the unquiet mind and restless heart.
