This evening I drove home from Rochester with one of my daughters. The drive takes about an hour and fifteen minutes. We left just as evening was beginning to fall; by the time we were halfway home, it was dark.

The first half-hour of the drive is on a reasonably large highway. After that, it becomes very rural, passing through a few small towns but mostly curving between corn fields and through the occasional stretch of woods. Except in those few towns, there are no streetlights.

Dark, winding, rural, the constant threat of deer or other wildlife, and tonight some off-and-on rainfall—it’s a drive when you definitely want not just the headlights, but the brights.

Other drivers, of course, feel the same way. And as they approached me from the opposite direction—me with my 55-year-old eyes straining against the oncoming glare—I got to thinking about headlights.

Headlights are a subject oddly neglected by philosophers. Given the widespread symbolic significance of light, this might appear surprising. God begins creation by saying, “Let there be light,” and Jesus later declared, “I am the light of the world.” When Plato’s philosopher ascends from the cave, his journey culminates in direct contemplation of the sun, a metaphor for the Idea of the Good, which Socrates calls “the universal author of all things beautiful and right, parent of light and of the lord of light in this visible world, and the immediate source of reason and truth in the intellectual.” When Dante reaches the heights of Paradise, in the final canto of The Divine Comedy, he finds himself in the presence of the Light Eternal.

Headlights, however, have not attracted the attention they warrant in light of this tradition. My researches have turned up only one meaningful reference. In 1934, the German Marxist philosopher Ludwig Pelagius Schmidtke-Müller published his notorious materialist attack on Christianity, Gegen die Torheit der abergläubischen Christen (Against the Folly of the Superstitious Christians), in which he advanced the theory that Saul’s famous conversion on the road to Damascus, in which he was blinded by a great light from heaven—as recounted by Luke in Acts 9—was in fact caused by an oncoming carriage that failed to dim its bright lanterns. I do not believe this interpretation has found much favor with later exegetes, however.

As a small contribution to filling this gap, therefore, I hereby advance the following theses as a starting-point for further reflection.

1. Darkness challenges humanity in its essence, the ground of its Dasein. We find ourselves in darkness, but the darkness must not overcome us.

2. The basic headlight responds to this challenge. Like all beneficial technology, it originates in humanity’s effort to conquer the forces of nature and make of this world a more habitable home.

3. The spread of the headlight, however, as it is adopted by one vehicle after another, is an instance of Girardian mimesis.

4. Like all instances of mimetic desire, headlight multiplication generates new sources of conflict. Furthermore, competitive forces drive bourgeois consumers toward performative headlight oneupmanship, as they strive to outdo their rivals in the brightness, penetration, and brilliant color of their headlights.

5. The resulting situation replicates Hobbes’s famous state of nature, a war of all against all: as two cars approach each other, the drivers cannot be confident that if they turn off their brights, their counterpart will do so as well. As a result, in a classic prisoner’s dilemma scenario, both drivers leave their brights on, creating a situation of infinite danger.

6. The result of this escalation is a great deal of cursing and malediction.

7. For reasons that are yet unknown, all of these features appear to be accentuated in rural areas.

Clearly a great deal of work remains to be done in this area, but my humble hope is that future philosophers can build upon the foundation I have laid here.

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The Microstack has received classified transcripts from meetings of high-ranking officials in the Department of the Interior. Because they reflect policy discussions of broad public interest, I am releasing a short excerpt from them here. In order to protect my sources, I have removed participants’ names from the document.

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Speaker 1: The boss is pretty psyched about this whole Lake America thing.

Speaker 2: He can’t stop telling everyone about its “beautiful new name.”

Speaker 3: Does he even know which of the lakes it is?

S2: Nah, he just knows it’s one of those big lakes—“great, very great, very… great… American” lakes—between us and those poutine-eating wimps up north.

S1: Careful what you say, McMaster’s office is next door, and he’s tight with Vance. Let’s get down to business.

S4: What’s up?

S1: As you know, the basis for renaming Lake Ontario was the president’s Executive Order #14172, “Restoring Names That Honor American Greatness.” You all have a copy of that in front of you. The recent action, “Honoring the American History of the Great Lakes and Renaming Lake Ontario as Lake America,” was issued in furtherance of that directive.

S3: You know what’s funny? People are actually paying attention to it. I was looking up directions last night to visit some cousins in Rochester, and Google Maps had changed the lake’s name. At first I had no idea what I was looking at.

S1: The big guy wants to build on that momentum and sees a winning campaign issue here. He wants us to compile a database of other names that ought to be changed as well.

S4: Other names?

S1: Right, unamerican names.

S2: Like what?

S1: He wants to start big, make a real splash. With New Mexico.

S2: The state?

S1: Of course, the state. From now on it’s gonna be New America. “It might be Old Mexico,” I heard him say, “but it’s New Mexico.” They’ve got a Democratic governor too, so it’s perfect.

S3: People will never go for that. It’s crazy.

S1: If they’ll go for Lake America, they’ll go for anything. Besides, you know how the boss feels about Mexico—all those illegal alien criminals they keep sending across the border. Very bad people. But he’s really ticked at the Canadians right now, maybe even more than at Mexico, which, I mean, who’d’ve thought that was possible.

S4: I don’t think there are a lot of place names with “Canada” in them. Or even things like “Ontario.” It’s not like we got a buncha Saskatchewans or Manitobas over here.

S1: You’ve heard of the Canadian Rockies? From now on they’ll be the American Rockies.

S2: But the Canadian Rockies are in Canada.

S1: You mean the 51st state. And besides, so what? You think anyone cares about that kinda thing? Sure, little old Mark Blarney-Carney ‘ll whine about it and throw a hissy fit. But Google Maps doesn’t listen to him, they listen to us.

S3: I don’t know. It seems a little crazy.

S1: Smithers told me what’s next on his list: Indian names.

S4: But those are all over the place. We’d be changing half the names in the country.

S1: Exactly. But remember, Obama started this whole thing. He renamed Mount McKinley, called it “Denali.” Crazy lib nonsense. The boss named it right back again, but then he got to thinkin’, and he’s got a whole theory about this, how Obama is just the latest in a long line of woke liberals who’ve been giving places Indian names, going back a few centuries. It’s all a plot to steal our land.

S3: Steal our land?

S1: Yeah, and give it back to the Indians. Can you believe that?

S2: No.

S1: But listen, I know where we’re gonna start with these crazy Indian names. Don’t tell anyone yet, it’s still top-secret. Maybe you’ve heard of the Dakota Indians. Let me introduce you to the two most recently and oh-so-very-proudly renamed states of the union: North and South America.

S4: But those names are already taken. They’re continents.

S1: Oh, he’s got that covered. We’ll rename them too.

S4: The continents?

S1: Of course.

S3: So what’ll we call them, then?

S1: The United States of America.

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Yesterday evening I held the last-session of a four-week online reading group I was leading on behalf of the Hildebrand Project. About ten participants joined me to work through excerpts from My Battle Against Hitler: Faith, Truth and Defiance in the Shadow of the Third Reich, by Dietrich von Hildebrand. Von Hildebrand was a twentieth-century Catholic philosopher. Originally from Germany, he was an outspoken critic of National Socialism and anti-Semitism. When the Nazis took power, he had to flee. He first went to Vienna, where he spent several years editing an anti-totalitarian journal; when Hitler invaded Austria, he had to flee again, eventually ending up in the United States.

This particular volume includes selections from personal memoirs he wrote later in life at the request of his wife, together with some of the essays he authored in Vienna. I hope to write about it soon at From My Bookshelf.

This morning, though, I’m thinking less about the book than about the experience of leading the online discussions. As a way of sparking conversation, I borrowed a technique that I use sometimes in class. I asked participants to select a passage each week that they would like to hear us discuss together, something that stood out to them as significant, interesting, or confusing. The only additional criterion was to pick something suitable for discussion—not a highly technical passage or a throwaway detail, not a passage with some arcane historical reference that I might or might not be able to explain, but one you could imagine us spending ten minutes usefully probing for insights together.

When I do this in class, it serves a few interrelated purposes. It gives students a little more incentive to do the reading and hopefully means they come to class better prepared to talk. It also helps me connect our discussion to things they are themselves interested in, which can produce more lively conversations. In the context of the Hildebrand group, I was not worried about the first of these; only people who were already interested and motivated would have signed up in the first place. But the second was perhaps an even more useful goal than with my own students. If undergraduates have to talk about the things that I think are important rather than the ones they think are important, that is not much of a loss. But more advanced learners join the conversation as something closer to peers, bringing valuable insights and experiences of their own.

The passages my undergraduate students bring to class for discussion are a pretty mixed bag. Sometimes they make fairly random selections and one silently wonders, “Why did you think that would be a good passage to discuss?” Sometimes they choose something that might be interesting for one reason or another but is not really terribly important or does not highlight key ideas from the reading. In a class of thirty students, probably only three or four will consistently select passages that are really ideal, passages that have me thinking, “Yes! That’s exactly the paragraph I hoped we would cover!” Often my job is to spin an only tangentially significant passage into something that lets me raise questions and themes I want to be sure we talk about.

In the Hildebrand group, by contrast, it struck me that these participants almost invariably directed us toward passages that were truly worth our time. This was obvoius to me after the very first session, and it made me aware of something I knew but had not explicitly formulated to myself before: that the ability to single out the key passages in a text—to finish thirty pages of reading and be able to point to the three or four paragraphs that cut most deeply to the heart of the issue, where the author makes his or her most critical argumentative moves—is a failsafe test of whether or not someone is reading with real insight and understanding.

In an ordinary seminar discussion about a literary or philosophical text, I’ll often ask a question with a particular passage in mind where I want us to look for the answer. Sometimes I’ll get a student who has the knack for pointing us directly to the “right” passage, the section I want us to read aloud. When I get a student like that, I know that he or she really “gets” it.

That ability to identify a key passage for discussion is like a higher-level reading comprehension test. A typical comprehension test might supply a paragraph and then ask questions about its meaning. But to hand someone a text and say, “Identify the key passages in this,” pushes the task to a higher level. Now the question is not simply whether one has understood several sentences or a paragraph. Instead, one must grasp the overall logic and structure of a piece of writing, understanding exactly what is happening where, and why.

So thanks to my Hildebrand participants for helping me see more clearly the value of an exercise I routinely use in class. Their superior skill in idenifying valuable passages for discussion highlighted exactly what I learn by asking students to engage in an exercise I originally started using mainly to encourage students to keep up with their reading.

By the way, the key sentence in this little essay? Paragraph six, sentence two.

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My fall semester is a little different than usual this year, as I am on sabbatical—at least, sort of. I’m actually still working full-time, but after a couple of years of roughly twice that, one job instead of two should feel like a break. I have administrative duties this year, but (almost) no teaching. Even so, nothing matches the craziness of a first day back….

5:50am: The alarm clock rings. It’s the first day of classes, and I’m not even teaching, but already I’ve had my first five-and-a-half-hours-of-sleep night of the new semester. I’ve been teaching online all summer and was up late last night grading papers and exams from courses that ended over the weekend. I wasted an hour or so gathering the evidence needed to nail a couple of kids who were, shall we say, not doing their own work. A bittersweet feeling: happy to have caught them; sorrowful to have caught them. Would be happy to sleep later but have an 8am meeting.

6:20am: Quick ten-minute walk up and down the street to get the juices flowing.

6:35am: Prepare breakfast, wash some dishes, help with chores, finish getting ready.

7:45am: Exit. It begins.

8:00am: Meeting of the deans (of which I am one, though the title is misleading—think of a department chair on steroids) and the provost. All of us are absolutely delighted to be here bright and early at 8am on the first day of classes. The colleague who requested this meeting time arrives 40 minutes late.

9:15am: Back in the office, grading papers.

10:30am: Wander down for a brisk circuit around the quad. Run into multiple former students who are back on campus again. Happy to see them, but nervously aware that I need to get back to my grading, not stand around chewing the fat. One young man is wearing a kilt he bought in Scotland after completing our honors program in London last spring. A brave young laddie, that.

11:45am: Lament together with colleague, a fellow dean, about where on earth we will find savings for requested budget cuts. A difficult existential question: would you prefer to cut budgets or grade papers?

1:00pm: Back home for the midday meal with the family: marinated pork loin, rice, roasted mixed vegetables. Big shout-out to my wife. Also find a pleasant surprise in the mail, the newest shipment from Slightly Foxed, which this time is a two-for-one extravaganza: R. C. Sheriff’s memoir, No Leading Lady. Accompanied by the most recent issue of their quarterly journal, which looks great, including essays on Miklós Bánffy, Ivan Turgenev, Elizabeth Jenkins, and more. If you don’t already know Slightly Foxed, check them out.

1:30pm: Wife reads aloud her weekday picture book and today delivers a really delightful one: Escargot, written by Dashka Slater and illustrated by Sydney Hanson. The story of a mildly vain but very sweet French snail in search of a salad with croutons and a light vinaigrette, but no carrots, and also in search of a friend. You should reserve it from your local library. Really.

2:00pm: Nap.

2:20pm: Walk back to campus. Upon returning, meet in person with another student about whose academic honesty I have concerns. Amicable conversation concluding with confession and reasonably satisfactory resolution.

3:00pm: Budgetary chit-chat with departmental colleague.

3:15pm: Back to grading. Time to buckle down for the stretch run.

4:50pm: One more walk around the quad. Encounter with another fellow dean—there are lots of us, believe it or not—but we do not discuss budget cuts. We discuss student cheating in online courses and home repairs. Both of them rather cheerless topics.

5:05pm: More grading. Go, go, go…!

5:55pm: Phone call with my wife to clarify a zillion different e-mails she has sent me—okay, maybe it was more like only five or six—with things I’m supposed to print out for her German classes that start tomorrow. She also wants me to proofread her syllabus. Even though I still need to grade these last papers tonight. Which I suppose is reasonable. I am her dean, after all. Even if she’s my boss.

6:10pm: Heading home for supper.

7:30pm: The dishes are done, and now it’s time to proofread those German syllabi. My wife has written them, I must say, with admirable German thoroughness. They are detailed. Very detailed. My aging eyes are barely up to the task in the evening twilight.

8:30pm: Proofreading complete. My wife still needs to print these out ahead of her classes tomorrow. And our youngest daughter wants to go for a walk. And we’re out of kleenex in a house of allergic noses. With logistical brilliance, I organize our campaign: while mother and daughter walk to campus, I drive to the grocery store for kleenex before it closes at 9pm, and I then return to campus to drive the womenfolk home now that it’s dark.

9:00pm: I’m ready. They aren’t. I sit down in my office to continue grading and immediately discover another AI-generated paper. I know it, and Substack’s very own Pangram agrees with me. This AI business is an absolute plague.

9:30pm: I’m still ready. They still aren’t. Next paper.

9:45pm: Home again.

10:45pm: Brief break from grading to prepare materials for some students who will be studying foreign languages online under my supervision. Should have done this yesterday!

11pm: Back to those papers. The grading deadline is now. I’m still grading.

As I will be until it is tomorrow, rather than today… so, since I expect nothing else exciting to change between now and midnight—I certainly hope it doesn’t—I will sign off!

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Odds and ends late on a Sunday afternoon:

Friday’s Microstack was one of my most successful. I have apparently found the secret to attracting readers: throw your employer under the bus.

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The Microstack has occasionally taken aim at our current penchant for strange meteorological neologisms (great phrase, that): wintry mix, heat dome, bomb cyclone, and the like. But now I am stumping for a new one. All afternoon we have had the most peculiar weather. It was supposed to rain today, but it hasn’t exactly done that. Every half-hour it suddenly begins to rain, moderately hard, for one to two minutes. Then it stops, the sky clears, and the sun comes out. A couple of times there were not even any clouds to begin with; my daughters went out in search of a rainbow, but in vain.

We need a name for these odd, short cloudbursts. Spitshowers? Stutterstorms? Peekaboo-pluie? Hiccup squalls? Help me out.

These short bursts of rain also seem to be motivated by a malicious logic: they occur every time I step outside to see if I can take a short walk. I make it maybe a hundred feet down the street, and here they come. If I look in one direction, the sky is gray and overcast. In the other: blue and sunny with a few fluffy white clouds. Strange.

If you did not see ’s post yesterday, you should give it a quick read. Apparently Amazon and several of the big AI companies are buying up old books, physical books, from used book dealers. They then cut off the spines, scan in the pages to feed the large language models on which artificial intelligence is built, and dispose of the books. This is dreadful. We can never recover those books once they are lost.

I think I would support a law making it a criminal offense to destroy physical books for the purpose of inputting their “data” into LLM’s in order to develop AI. I bet a lot of other people would, too.

I’m a born and bred Lutheran. We Lutherans like to sing. These days I attend a Catholic parish with my family—don’t just attend, in fact, but also play the organ and sometimes cantor for Sunday Mass. Catholics, at least in this country, do not sing. (It is quite frustrating, actually, to spend time preparing the music and then have nobody sing. If you are reading this and are a regular church-attender… sing! As Chesterton said, if a thing is worth doing, it’s worth doing poorly.)

This morning, for the opening hymn, I played “O God Beyond All Praising.” (That recording, from the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, is a bit slow in my opinion, but still nice.) It’s a good hymn with a fairly catchy and quite singable tune, and it is—I think—pretty familiar. No one sang.

For the closing hymn, I chose “Take Up Your Cross.” We sang it to the tune of the old German chorale melody, Erhalt uns, Herr. It’s a great melody, with harmony by Bach. But I was pretty sure it would be unfamiliar and therefore was not expecting much (especially since American Catholics also have a tendency to begin leaving before the last hymn is even finished).

But what do you know? They sang! Life is full of surprises.

Another tip: I’ve enjoyed listening to the recent In Our Time podcast, an episode on the Delian League.

I’ve become one of “those people.” I recently turned 55, and things do begin to stiffen up with the years. I have especially noticed my shoulders tightening up and losing flexibility (due, no doubt, to many, many hours sitting hunched with poor posture over a computer keyboard).

Recently I’ve been going out early in the morning, before breakfast, for a short walk, really very short, just down our street and back, not more than a thousand steps on my phone’s step counter. Just to get myself moving and earn a little head-start on my step count for the day. So during the last week or so, since I’m out walking anyway, I’ve used the time to see if I can’t loosen up my shoulders a bit. I swing my arms forward and backward at my sides, then swing them back-and-forth in front of my chest, then walk “like a German,” as we call it, with my hands clasped behind my back to pull my shoulders back. (Watch a middle-aged or elderly German man out for a stroll sometime, and you’ll get it.) Then I repeat the sequence.

When I was young, I used to think that the occasional person out “power-walking” looked like an idiot. That’s not exactly what I’m doing, as I take comfort in reminding myself.

But I bet people think I look like an idiot.

One more tip: tomorrow morning, at Reading King Arthur, we begin the adventures of Sir Tristram. Good stuff. Check it out.

Classes begin on Tuesday, and the students are returning. Suddenly there is much more energy around campus. Yesterday saw a steady string of vehicles pulling up and unloading students with their belongings at the dormitories.

I would be lying if I said that I don’t regret the ending of summer. A quiet college campus that has emptied out for the summer has a beauty, charm, and peacefulness all of its own. Like many professors, I am an introvert, very comfortable alone with my books. The return of students is bittersweet.

But, as my wife always reminds me, without them I have no job! So of course I’m grateful, despite my wistfulness about August’s approaching end. As I was walking home for lunch yesterday, I ran into several familiar faces, back for the new school year. “Dr. Meilaender!” they shouted. They were genuinely happy to see me.

They’re good kids and, though I may occasionally grumble about them, they give me some hope for the future.

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Houghton welcomed its new, incoming freshman class today. As I walked to my office around 8am, cars were pulling up to the Campus Center, where they were met by screaming, sign-waving groups of current students.

I have sent four of my own five children off to college by now, and I’m afraid this sort of thing is par for the course at many places, though Houghton had not descended to such infantilism until a few years ago. For reasons I cannot fathom, people seem to think that the way to make a good impression on new students and their families is by a maximum of shouting, cheering, and general hullaballoo. Because nothing says “This is an academically serious place” like jumping up and down, shrieking.

But a much greater shock was awaiting me. The building where I have my office houses a large, central atrium with an office wing to one side and a classroom wing to the other. From the upper floors, you can look down into that central atrium. My own office is on the third floor.

Around 10am I wandered over to the faculty lounge to make a cup of coffee. I heard loud, giggly voices from below, so I looked over the rail and down into the atrium. There I saw a half-dozen colleagues—faculty, staff, and administrators—gathered together.

They were getting into large, blow-up, plastic animal costumes.

I’ll just let that sink in for a moment. They were getting into large, blow-up, plastic animal costumes.

It was an odd assortment: a pig, a chicken, a zebra, a bald eagle, even a seahorse and a tyrannosaurus rex.

These were grown adults, you understand, some of them with doctoral degrees. They wandered out of the building like a zoo-and-barnyard adult Halloween party, to do God only knows what.

I am, I confess, biased against this sort of thing. I am most definitely not its intended audience. Every fiber of my being reacts in horror to such an embarrassing, undignified, and tasteless display.

Even allowing for my (thoroughly justified) prejudices, however, and recognizing that probably some students thought it was funny, I think this sort of thing is a mistake, the relic of a marketing strategy that might have worked twenty years ago but is now outdated.

What kind of message does this costume display send about the college experience? Roughly this: that you are here for a fun and goofy four-year Christian summer camp.

When every middle-class family still took it for granted that going to college was just the thing you do after finishing high school, that might have worked. But no more. People today are deeply skeptical of higher education and in particular of its expense, or what folks like to call its “value proposition.” They may still be willing to pay good money for a real education. But not for four of years of fun at camp.

Granted, these students are already enrolled. We’ve got them. And their money. (Unless they turned around and drove back home in horror.) We aren’t any longer trying to recruit them.

But we are shaping their expectations through these initial experiences. We might, for example, after getting them checked into their dorm rooms, send them to the bookstore to collect their textbooks. Or offer a tour of the library. Or just get their ID photos taken and their mailboxes assigned.

Instead, we treat them to a display of supposedly intelligent people, engaged in the supposedly serious business of pursuing truth, walking around in ugly, puffy animal costumes.

I know, I know: many people, perhaps most people, perhaps even you, Gentle Reader, will consider me an old stick-in-the-mud, a party-pooper, a thrower of cold water, an old-before-his-time crotchety crank who begrudges everyone a bit of fun.

Guilty as charged. I accept the titles proudly.

I fear, however, that our new students may take us more seriously than we take ourselves, and that if we set them an example, they will follow it.

Oink, oink.

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The other day I complained about buying new eyeglasses. The day before that I complained (well, sort of) about getting a new passport for my wife.

It occurred to me, therefore, that I’m on a complaining roll. And if you’ve got a good thing going, why stop?

Hence:

• Earlier this summer, I made three separate trips to the shop and spent over $1000 trying to get a “rear back-up light” repaired on my van—necessary in order for it to pass the annual state inspection. Now it is apparently not working again.

• As if that weren’t enough, I’ve also made three more trips—the third of them this morning—to three different shops looking for a fix on a burning smell coming from the engine area. Never a good thing to have a burning smell coming from your engine. I’ve learned that it’s due to an oil leak. But it’s still not fixed. Perhaps the fourth time will be a charm?

• Auto mechanics are a lot like doctors: much of the time, they’re just guessing.

• This afternoon I tried to pay a medical bill online. Usually they have to remind me two or three times, but this time I was on top of things. (Okay, I confess that I may have had some prodding from my wife.) But it didn’t work. I first tried a “guest payment,” not wanting to create yet another account in yet another online system. No luck. I then reluctantly tried to create an account using an activation code they had provided. Still no luck. Finally I called. The third time was a charm, which I guess puts them slightly ahead of my current run of auto mechanics.

• Gas prices.

• Paying $5.50 for a flat white at Starbucks.

• And then there’s the online company to which our college bookstore has farmed out the business of selling textbooks. I’m not impressed. They’ve been generating phantom classes that I am not teaching for which I’m supposed to submit textbook orders. I ignore them. But that is nothing compared to what my poor wife has suffered through for the German class she is teaching. First they listed all of her books twice. She would have one taken off and then it would reappear. Now they tell her they can’t get a dictionary she listed, one that she ordered herself for about $20 over Amazon and received in a few days. They say they can’t order books from international publishers. Most of her other books—which they can apparently order—are from international publishers…. Oh, how I long for the days when college bookstores still had an actual, physical textbook department.

• For that matter, how I long for the days when college bookstores sold books, and not simply t-shirts, sweatshirts, and similar “gear.”

• It seems that everyone, everywhere, is having bad weather of one sort or another this summer. We’ve already had flooding in our garage twice during heavy rains. But down the hill from us is the Houghton Inn, and they have it worse. Behind their parking lot runs a drainage ditch that seems to be blocked. Every time it rains hard for half an hour, the entire parking lot floods, leaving a bunch of muck behind once the water recedes. You might think the town or county could clear out the ditch.

• Grading papers. Non-teachers have no idea how tedious this becomes after 5, 10, 15, 20, 25 years. It’s important. But boring. Very boring.

• For our daughter, away at college in southern California, we ordered a little sweet treat from Whole Foods via Amazon. Her apartment complex requires keypad entry, so my wife left delivery instructions with the order. We received an alert that the delivery vehicle was approaching; ourdaughter went to meet it. But it never showed up, even when we received a follow-up message that the package had been delivered. After we all wasted half an hour trying to figure out what had happened, the story had a happy ending: somehow, the delivery man had made it up to her apartment and left the gift with a roommate. But why don’t people read simple instructions?

• School should never start before September. Never. Never, ever.

• Derechos. Another weather phenomenon. Look them up. New word for me, as of about two minutes ago. My parents evidently had a derecho last week. Definitely something to be avoided.

• People who complain too much.

That’s enough for tonight, don’t you think? Thanks for letting me vent.

Wondering if I should make this a monthly feature…. There’s always something to gripe about!

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Yesterday it was a passport; today, eyeglasses.

My wife and I both had appointments today at the eye doctor. At our age, joint medical appointments are our idea of a date.

Her vision had not changed a bit. Mine had once again gotten slightly worse.

After my previous appointment, a year ago, I intended to replace my glasses. I could tell that my vision had deteriorated. It was harder to read in the evenings, and—most irritatingly—the organ music on Sunday mornings was located at an increasingly awkward distance from my face.

I intended to buy new glasses, therefore. But I didn’t. I began looking at the choices available, and after a half-hour or so I grew frustrated, gave it up, and never worked up the motivation to return.

This year, however, I was determined to grit my teeth and complete the process. I’ve been removing the glasses to read in the evening. And on Sunday mornings I crane my neck back at an awkward angle in order to peer through the little bit of lens that lets me read the notes.

But of course I faced the same conundrum this year as last: I hate shopping for new glasses.

My antipathy is a variation on a familiar theme. There are any number of similar things for which I hate shopping, as you probably do also. Shoes, for instance. Shirts and pants. For women, bras must top the list.

The essential problem in all of these cases is the same: one confronts dozens and dozens of nearly identical choices, varying only in minor details. If you don’t like one of the options, therefore, you probably won’t like the others either. So you search, and you search, and you try on this one and that one, rejecting them all and growing more and more irritated by the minute.

Or you face the opposite extreme: the items that don’t look just like all the others have been deliberately designed to be attention-grabbing in some unattractive fashion—strange and gaudy colors, weird shapes, new and impractical features that are supposed to set them apart from last year’s models. Their very striving after originality dooms them to ugliness.

So there I was, gazing upon row after row of nearly, though not quite identical spectacles. Grimacing, I tried on one pair after another, as my wife and one of our daughters looked on to offer assessments as needed. Minor variations in color, millimeter differences in lens width, nose pieces that curved ever so slightly or were straight… who would imagine that such tiny details could make an appreciable difference? Not I.

I was very nearly deterred, on the brink of giving up, when a certain stubbornness kicked in—I would like to call it virtue, or prudence, or determination, but I think it was just stubbornness—and a voice inside me said, “Now or never.”

So gathering my last reserves of energy, I made one more round of the options, selecting five or six for a closer examination. I took off one pair and put on another, peered intently in the mirror, called on wife and daughter for advice, and even asked the optician her opinion. Six pairs became five; five became four; four became three. My wife took pictures and texted them to our daughter at home for her opinion. Three became two.

And then: success. I had a winner.

Now I just have to hope that two things prove true. First, that I am still satisfied, or at any rate not dissatisfied, two weeks from now when the glasses are ready to pick up.

And second, that I don’t have to do it again for at least another four or five years.

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This morning we drove up to Buffalo so that my wife could renew her German passport, which will soon expire. We had an appointment with the honorary consul for our region, who is authorized to process the paperwork for this and similar requests in western New York.

He was friendly and helpful—we have visited him a couple of times in the past—and the process went smoothly. We were in and out in under an hour. I am $325 poorer, but it was, as the Germans say, “kurz und schmerzlos” (short and painless).

It did, however, send my mind back about thirty years into the past, to the days shortly after our marriage, when I was trying to come up with a dissertation topic for my doctorate in political theory.

I had toyed with two or three different ideas but was not entirely happy with them. But one night I was sitting at our small dining room table, filling out the forms for my wife to get her green card, an endeavor filled with all the bureaucratic joys you might expect.

As I sat there growing more and more frustrated, I thought to myself, “Can they really make me do all this for my own wife?”

My next thought was, “Maybe there’s a dissertation topic there somewhere.”

As indeed there was. I happened to have one collection of essays about citizenship in the bedroom; it happened to include one essay specifically on immigration; and that essay happened to be the seminal piece on the ethics of immigration by a political theorist. I had my topic and was off to the races.

My answer to that first question eventually proved to be, Yes, they can. The government would be wrong to deny legal residency to my wife (or the spouse of any citizen), but certainly it may require some process for application and registration, along with an appropriately modest processing fee.

Be that as it may, I will admit that the more I have traveled, the more frustrated I have become by the barriers countries throw up to ordinary international travel. Borders and border controls are ethically justified (within certain broad limits). But, though justified, they are also frustrating.

Last fall at From My Bookshelf I conducted a read-along of Stefan Zweig’s great memoir, The World of Yesterday. Zweig was a proud European and cosmopolitan. He traveled widely, promoted the work of other European writers and artists, translated foreign texts into German, and built a vast international network of literary connections.

At one point in the book he laments the increasing difficult of traveling from one European country to another. He longs nostalgically for the days of his youth, when travel was easy and borders presented no obstacles. Oh, for the days when no passport was necessary!, he thinks.

I cannot entirely suppress that little part of my brain—or perhaps my heart?—that sympathizes with Zweig.

Especially when handing over that $325 check.

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I am sitting at a Wegmans grocery store—the family-owned Wegmans chain is one of Western New York’s regional treasures—and waiting to pick up my daughter.

She is volunteering this week with the summer camp program at the Genesee Country Village & Museum, a local living history museum that has recreated an 1830s-style village by moving and preserving a variety of buildings from the area—an inn, a smithy, some churches, a general store, a print shop, a cobbler, a few private residences, and more. Though an hour from our home, it’s a nice regional outing, and we’ve been members for many years now.

My daughter’s job this week is to assist a camp teacher with a group of about ten girls aged 7-10 who have signed up for a week-long program that is part “school from the 19th century,” part “fun in nature.” They keep journals and press flowers; they gather eggs from the village hens and go on a hike to wade in the local creek.

My daughter is herself only eighteen, but she finishes each evening—as did some of her older sisters before her, when they did the same thing—newly astonished by what her young charges cannot do and do not know.

What does it say when an eighteen-year-old finds herself muttering, “Kids these days”?

One child, for example, went tearing across a room the other morning, shouting in horror. When asked what the problem was, she said there was an “animal on the wall over there!”

It was a spider.

Apparently, this was an unidentifiable wild beast to her. The children seem to be uniformly terrified of spiders, whether they know what they are or not. I am proud to say that my daughter, though none too fond of spiders herself, handled the situation.

In fact, the children appear frightened of any bugs at all. Western New York is pretty rural, and bugs and spiders are hardly unfamiliar sights—they belong to the ordinary backdrop of life. I foresee difficulty for these children in the years to come.

Kids these days.

The other day, the group had “math class.” The children did not yet know what multiplication and division were. I can see that in a seven-year-old… but a ten-year-old? Several did not know how to do long subtraction; one child announced that she could do nothing with any numbers higher than 20.

Kids these days.

They also complain whenever asked to walk more than about fifty yards. Since most destinations in the village would be more than fifty yards distant, that’s a lot of complaining. One girl yesterday plopped down in a grassy meadow at the end of the afternoon and announced she wasn’t going any farther and wasn’t getting on the bus.

Kids these days.

You can imagine the chorus of protest on the 1.5-mile hike to the creek. “Are we there yet?” Most of the walk lies outside the museum grounds, but these children had not yet reached the museum exit and were complaining that it was already too far. (Wouldn’t you have jumped at the chance to go splash in a creek as a child?) It is apparent that they simply do no walking in their daily routines.

Kids these days.

I am (almost) fifty-five years old. I am supposed to be entering my curmudgeonly stage.

But an 18-year-old should not yet have been driven to curmudgeondom.

Kids these days.

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