This is not a blog essay two days early but a temporizing announcement five days late. We are boarding an airplane tonight to fly to Europe. Nice! That is a place name, not an adjective. We are reserving the adjective for the lovely country property about a hundred kilometers to the west of the airport where we shall join a small group of friends, most of them known to us for more than sixty years, in a subdued house-party, gastronomic festival, and continuous seminar punctuated, possibly, by a few carefully distanced visits to sites noted for their particular natural beauty, archaeological importance, or architectural interest. You know what they say about old wines, old books, and old friends. Well, it is all true. Travel under the current circumstances is not to be undertaken casually or heedlessly. Had we but world enough and time…timidity would be no crime. Boosted by our booster shots, numerous other careful pre-arrangements, and as much of the cardinal virtue of Prudence as we can claim, we set off with blithe spirits, but just a little edgily.
For more than a decade I have been fairly fanatical about publishing a weekly essay here. This has been a self-imposed task. Neither of my regular readers has pressured me. But doing so while traveling has sometimes required heroic efforts. Dame Prudence is an anti-fanatic. I don’t know what electronic resources I shall actually have during the next ten days, and nothing more may appear here until September 22nd. Maybe even later. So, just to be prudent, let me wish you all a most happy ending to the calendrical summer of 2021.
