I was sitting in the living room of our cabin the other night, reading an old copy of The London Review of Books, feeling relaxed and virtuous, when a bat flew out of the hallway and started circling overhead. It was 9pm, very dark and I was alone. I like bats but in an enclosed space I like them much less. I turned out the rest of the lights, propped open the doors, swore a few times and, finally, the bat flew out into the night. This is country living! No lines outside bakeries, no girls in workout clothes wielding water bottles, but bats. Pick your poison.
There are two sides of most people. Well two sides of me, anyway. There’s life in New York. The grid, newsstands, Three Lives, The Met, bodegas, ambition, noise and the rest of it. Then there’s life here in Wisconsin: a lake, pine trees, birds, eggs from the farmer, a kitchen you can actually turn around in, a grill. You could expand this and say the cultural life of cities, Paris and London, and the natural world of the country, Scotland and Montana.
Being away from Manhattan puts things in perspective. It’s helpful to be around people who haven’t heard of Substack. The newspaper comes a few days late and that may be the best way to know what’s happening in the world, not in real time on the phone, but with a little distance and in print. You might think, I’m in the country I can forget everything everywhere else. But oddly, I often think about Paris. My dad gave me a copy of Between Meals the summer of 1995, before I studied in France. I read that book that year and my favorite parts most other years. Something about the brasseries seems even more desirable when the nearest grocery store is an hour away.
The friction of deciding where we want to live and how, will always be with us. Michael wrote a great piece praising second cities about his well-balanced life in La Jolla, but really about assessing what matters to him these days. Foster Huntington wrote thoughtfully about how he left a great job at Ralph Lauren fifteen years ago to live an outdoor life in Oregon and beyond.
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