THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS ONE TRUE LOVE:

What Is Love? A Philosopher Explains It’s Not A Choice Or A Feeling − It’s A Practice (Edith Gwendolyn Nally, Aug 1, 2024, Discover)

The ancient Greek philosopher Plato thought that love might cause feelings like attraction and pleasure, which are out of your control. But these feelings are less important than the loving relationships you choose to form as a result: lifelong bonds between people who help one another change and grow into their best selves.

Similarly, Plato’s student Aristotle claimed that, while relationships built on feelings like pleasure are common, they’re less good for humankind than relationships built on goodwill and shared virtues. This is because Aristotle thought relationships built on feelings last only as long as the feelings last. […]

Plato and Aristotle both thought that love is more than a feeling. It’s a bond between people who admire one another and therefore choose to support one another over time.

Maybe, then, love isn’t totally out of your control.

A RELIGION OF FORM, NOT SUBSTANCE:

Nineteenth Century French Catholics’ Challenge to Integralism (Jennifer Conner, 2023, Hillsdale Forum)

But not all nineteenth century Catholics felt that liberalism, and the tolerance it brought with it, was getting in the way of the common good. For these Catholics, liberal policies were the guarantors of the Church’s freedom, and a free Church ultimately brought about the common good. Freedom of the Church was a major concern in restoration France. The Concordat signed by Napoleon was still in effect, making Church officials salaried employees of the state and obliging clergy to swear an oath of loyalty to the French state. Historic Church lands were still in the possession of the state and the state monopolized education. The Church and state seemed to be working closely together, but it was hindering the Church.

In the newspaper L’Avenir, Henri Lacordaire argued that the Church needed “to rid itself of all solidarity with a power [the French state] which was not animated by [the Church’s] spirit, and to seek the exercise of the freedoms promised to every citizen.” Lacordaire argued that the French state was not acting in consonance with the Church’s best interests. Critically, his proposed solution is not immediately conforming the state to serve the Church’s interests but rather granting proper freedoms for every citizen. In his view, the state ought to allow the Church to function freely and fulfill its mission. This approach hearkens back to Augustine’s claims in City of God that the task of the state is to maintain peace so that the Church can function. This is very different from Vermeule’s integralist model. Rather than an elite religious group enforcing very particular moral standards from the top of the government, the state would promote tolerance and allow the Church to educate the citizenry and care for their souls. Only then would the people be virtuous, and when their virtuous interests were represented by their government, the laws would become more virtuous in turn, and serve the common good.

In Lacordaire’s view, as long as the state had, in principle, the power to suppress individual rights for the purposes of promoting Catholic ends, it also had the power to oppress the Church. The French state seemed to benefit the Church by bankrolling its officials, but the salaries came with strings attached, including state interference in Catholic education. Lacordaire took umbrage with this particular infringement and, with the help of Lamennais and Montalembert, opened an unsanctioned Catholic school for boys in Paris. Shortly after its opening, state officials came to close the school and seize the building. Lacordaire was forced to send the boys home and he only barely retained the building by claiming it as his residence and pointing to his sleeping mat in the corner of the classroom.

The solution, for Lacordaire, was not a return to an integrated Catholic monarchy, but to promote the separation of Church and state. The Church, he argued, “always had the words reason and liberty on her lips when the inalienable rights of the human race were threatened.” Lacordaire might have been inclined to agree with Joseph Ratzinger’s later explanation of liberty as “having to do with being given a home.” It was through the Church that an individual could reach his true home and true liberty, and in order to fully participate in the Church — to receive a Catholic education, for example — the state ought to adopt a policy of tolerance. Thus there are two kinds of “liberty” at play here: the one is the theological liberty of membership in the Church, and the other is a sort of political tolerance, or willingness to allow a political regime to remain agnostic on certain questions, at least temporarily.

Crucially—here Lacordaire’s liberalism differs from a kind of libertarianism which admits no vision of a common good—the separation of Church and state does not mean that religious values must always remain absent from the law. Ultimately, once individual souls have been gathered into the Church, their moral interests will be represented in popular government and therefore the positive laws of the state will accord more closely with morality. This is a process to be undertaken and it relies upon the conversion of souls; it is not a top-down fix predicated upon an all-knowing religious elite at the top of government foisting their views upon the hoi polloi.

When Lacordaire took Alexander de Tocqueville’s vacant seat in the Académie Francaise, an American reporter remarked that it was strange to see “a man so thoroughly imbued with the worship of the Catholic religion defend, before the world…liberty and equality.” As Lacordaire took the seat dressed in full Dominican habit — he had helped refound the Order of Preachers in France after its abolition during the Revolution — he saw no contradiction. At his induction, he delivered a powerful address affirming the consistency of sincere faith with tolerance, proclaiming his wish to “die a repentant religious and an unrepentant liberal.”

mAN fELL:

SimCity Isn’t a Model of Reality. It’s a Libertarian Toy Land (Kelly Clancy, 6/27/24, Wired)

After Bill Clinton won the 1992 US presidential election on the platform of health care reform, a nonprofit foundation commissioned Thinking Tools to design a hospital-management simulator. Released in 1994, SimHealth was played by policymakers and the public alike—including, famously, Clinton’s daughter, Chelsea. Maxis marketed SimHealth as more than mere entertainment: It was a policy tool and could be used to explore and reason about complex systems. Players assumed the role of a newly elected politician campaigning for health care reform. They used their finite political currency to promote policies that aligned with the values on which they based their election promises. They could track their policy changes against their stated values using a compass-like indicator that pitted Liberty against Equality and Community against Efficiency—ideals that are, in reality, by no means opposed.

Unlike SimCity players, SimHealth players could tinker with the underlying model and adjust hundreds of parameters. Yet tweaking the parameters was not the same as tweaking the models themselves, and the game had a clear ideological bias. Much as in SimCity, there wasn’t exactly a win state. But SimHealth’s values were hard to miss. The game trumpeted a somber funeral march whenever the Canadian-style single-payer socialized medicine plan popped up on the screen. As Keith Schlesinger writes in a review for Computer Gaming World, there was one easy way to win: “All you have to do is adopt an extreme libertarian ideology, eliminate all federal health care (including Medicare!), and cut other government services by $100–$300 billion per year.” Unfortunately, this could hardly be called a health policy victory, as it left the virtual citizens entirely without health coverage. Even the private insurance companies went bankrupt in the first few months. The game was a flop, and 30 years later, health care remains an intractable issue plaguing American politics.

Whereas SimRefinery gave players a new perspective on a complex, though defined, process, the US health care industry is so complex that SimHealth only muddied the waters. Paul Starr, who was a health care policy adviser to the Clinton administration, dismissed the game entirely. “SimHealth contains so much misinformation that no one could possibly understand competing proposals and policies, much less evaluate them, on the basis of the program.” He was concerned that people would mistake the game for a legitimate description of reality. He despaired that his daughter, an avid player, accepted the game’s libertarian-leaning strategies because that was “just the way the game works.”

All simulations are ultimately constrained by their creators’ assumptions: They are self-contained universes ticking along to preprogrammed logic. They don’t necessarily reflect anything fundamental about the world as it is, much less how we may want it to be.

The Bible is the story of even The Creator learning this lesson, which bequeaths liberalism.

BEAUTY IS OBJECTIVE:

Misunderstanding Plato (Paul Krause, July 5, 2024, Minerva Wisdom)

Plato’s cosmos is rationally ordered and hierarchal. It is a reflection of the perfection of the Forms, but not the whole cosmos is a perfect, or ideal, reflection. For instance, we all know the form of beauty looms large in Plato’s philosophy. The cosmos, taken as a whole, is a perfect reflection of the form of beauty. Constitutive parts, the sun, the moon, the stars, the earth, the rivers and trees and hills, etc., are not a perfect reflection of the form of beauty and never will be. Instead, every part of the cosmos has some beauty to it in differing degrees. This is only made possible, and makes sense, when you subscribe to a hierarchy of value and beauty as Plato did (which many moderns no longer do which makes it easier for moderns to misunderstand Plato). That is, in a hierarchy some things are naturally greater than others. Those things that are greater are closer in reflection to the ideal. For Plato, wholeness is the perfect reflection of the ideal. Smaller parts, breaking down to individual pieces, while having some embodiment of the ideal within them, are lesser than the whole.

Thus, the earth, and all that is within the earth, possess nature, a reflection of the ideal, but in comparison to the whole of the cosmos, the earth is lesser. Hence, the earth (alone) is not the fullest reflection of the form of beauty. Instead, the earth, when brought together with the sun, moon, stars, and other planets – that is, when the earth is properly situated in the whole of cosmos – becomes far more important and precious when you understand what function, or role, the earth plays in the perfect beauty and reflection of totality. This coming to know the truth magnifies the beauty of the earth and all within it.

CRANK IT UP:

The Scholar Who Inspired a Legion of Cranks (Colin Dickey, JULY 16, 2024, The Chronicle Review)

The publication of The Book of the Damned was a watershed moment in 20th-century culture. Without Fort, there would be no X-Files or Twin Peaks, no Unsolved Mysteries or In Search Of…, no Ancient Aliens or the dozens of similar shows on History and the Discovery Channel. Fort’s book gave space to theories and beliefs that were dubious, unpopular, and problematic; it gave readers tools to push back against biologists, physicists, and historians; and it encouraged people to remain skeptical toward academic orthodoxies. There had been plenty of cranks before Fort’s time: amateurs who’d set themselves up as pseudo-archaeologists to argue for the existence of Atlantis or pseudo-physicists to prove that ghosts were real. Having tried and abandoned that tactic, Fort found success by critiquing the establishment without offering a fully fleshed-out alternative theory. He didn’t need to have the answers; what he instead demanded was that scholars take seriously all that he claimed they had ignored and damned to irrelevance.

Fort inspired a legion of acolytes, and they are the subject of Think to New Worlds: The Cultural History of Charles Fort and His Followers (University of Chicago Press, June 2024), by Joshua Blu Buhs. While Fort himself has been the subject of several biographies, Forteans, Buhs writes, are far less understood, “ignored or dismissed as etiolated imitators.” This is unfortunate, he argues, because those who wrestled with Fort seriously “forged a unique response to modernity,” and their influence had a long, if unexpected, tail. These followers set themselves the task of transforming Fort from an outlier — “a magnificent nut,” in Tarkington’s words — to the center of a movement. How, they asked, could Forteanism be made into some kind of discipline, method, or system? Can a positive program be assembled from the facts of the damned? Can one make a science out of the rejection of science?

Perhaps the person most invested in this question was Tiffany Thayer, Fort’s main devotee and the man most responsible for attempting to shape his legacy. During the 1930s, Thayer had been an incredibly successful novelist, his lurid blockbuster Thirteen Men having made him a household name. (The follow-up, Thirteen Women, would be adapted as a pre-Code shocker starring Myrna Loy and Irene Dunne.) Thayer reached out to Fort when the latter’s career was at a low ebb, and helped get Fort’s third book, Lo!, published in 1931. He subsequently helped organize the original Fortean Society in New York City — a collective that would include Dreiser and Tarkington as well as other eminent literary men like the cultural critic H.L. Mencken and the playwright and screenwriter Ben Hecht. The Society’s goal, according to Dreiser, was “to make scientists take Fort seriously — as a thinker, not a crank.” It was a group effort at first, with the various members taking turns editing the Fortean Society’s magazine, Doubt. But gradually Thayer came to the fore, taking over the editorship of Doubt as well as Fort’s archives after Fort died in 1932.

Thayer devoted most of the rest of his career to attempting to shape Fort’s legacy and to establish a Fortean way of doing things, a methodology that could be self-sustaining in the absence of the author’s inimitable literary personality. Think to New Worlds chronicles Thayer’s attempts to create a stable discipline of Forteanism while constantly pushing back against the various ways in which other readers and thinkers tried to use Fort.

In a sense, the Fortean method was simple: Doubt everything, refuse to accept anything on faith, and seek out that which is generally excluded from dominant epistemologies. This radical skepticism was, Buhs notes, a kind of “anti-religion,” and Fort’s books became a Bible for those who’d seen the improbable or believed the implausible. Ufologists, from the start, leaned heavily on Fort’s work. As soon as the pilot Kenneth Arnold reported seeing nine shiny, unidentified flying objects flying past Mount Rainier in June 1947 (setting off the modern UFO craze), believers were quick to look to Fort for answers. A Chicago AP writer published a report of Arnold’s sighting alongside various evidence that he had pulled from Fort’s collected works as a means of bolstering Arnold’s claims: The unsigned article, “Rare Book Tells of Freak Discs in the Sky Long Ago,” culled passages from The Book of the Damned regarding “a luminous cloud moving at high velocity” over Florence, Italy, in 1731, “globes of light seen in the air” over Swabia in 1732, an “octagonal star” seen over Slavange, Norway, in 1752, and an event that happened in Skeninge, Sweden, in 1808, where the “sun turned brick red” and “there appeared on the Western horizon a number of round objects, dark brown in color and seemingly the size of a hat crown” that “passed overhead and disappeared on the eastern horizon.” Arnold’s was not, it seemed, an isolated experience: Here was a long, detailed history of similar sightings, alongside rains of frogs and reports of mutilated livestock. As more sightings accumulated and as people began to think governments were hiding something from the public, ufologists increasingly turned to Forteanism to help bolster their credibility.

Thayer fought back against this tendency, doing his best to keep Forteanism from becoming synonymous with ufology. Doubt had long solicited reports from its readers, but by the early 1950s Thayer’s mailbag was swamped with UFO sightings, which he tried to keep out of the magazine as much as possible. He had begun to doubt the doubters, and wondered whether the whole thing was only a hoax concocted by the CIA. The credulity with which the public embraced UFOs bothered him, and the ways in which the UFO community wanted to reduce all examples of Forteana to visitation by aliens enraged him. In 1953 he wrote to a friend, “I am now killing every man woman or child who says ‘saucer’ to me.”

Another contingent of Forteans could be found among science-fiction writers, who consistently mined Fort’s work for ideas. As John W. Campbell, author of Who Goes There? (the basis for John Carpenter’s The Thing) and editor of Astounding Science Fiction, wrote of the 1941 Thayer-edited omnibus The Books of Charles Fort, “It probably averages one science-fiction or fantasy plot idea to the page.” Fort had offered up nothing but a litany of the weird, the unusual, the thought-provoking, and the impossible — precisely the kind of things that science-fiction writers loved. H.P. Lovecraft’s The Whisperer in Darkness begins with a textbook Fortean element: newspaper reports of odd and inexplicable things of unknown organic matter (“pinkish things about five feet long; with crustaceous bodies bearing vast pairs of dorsal fins or membraneous wings and several sets of articulated limbs, and with a sort of convoluted ellipsoid, covered with multitudes of very short antennae, where a head would ordinarily be”) found in the wake of a historic flood. An early Robert Heinlein story, “Goldfish Bowl,” features two Fortean investigators whose inquiry into a pair of mysterious water spouts (a favorite anomaly of Fort’s) leads to revelations of disturbing alien intelligence. Frank Herbert, the author of Dune, mentions Fort by name in his story “Rat Race,” and in Stephen King’s novel Firestarter (which is about pyrokinesis, a staple Fortean topic), a man reads Lo! to his daughter as a bedtime story.

Thayer tolerated the science-fiction writers more than he did the ufologists, but not by much. Despite his own success writing commercial potboilers, Thayer remained far more interested in modernism and the avant-garde: “Science fiction was too conventional, too hackneyed, and boring,” Buhs explains. Thayer dreamed of Fortean dance, Fortean music, whatever that might possibly look like. But he found it impossible to guide Doubt’s readership away from science fiction and weird tales.

Swapping one crank science for another is not skepticism.

NIRVANA?:

What it’s like to live for five days on an uninhabited Scottish island (Patrick Galbraith, July 6, 2019, Country Life)

Scarba is a precipitous mountain rising up between two notoriously dangerous tidal races. To the south, the Corryvreckan Whirlpool rages and, to the north, the Grey Dogs rushes out into the Atlantic. The former almost killed George Orwell in 1948 when he misread the tide and the latter is said to be the watery grave of a Viking prince’s canine companion. According to Hebridean lore, the ghost of the drowned dog prowls the cliffs on moonless nights, seeking out the souls of shipwrecked sailors sheltering in caves along the shore.

It was in the back of one of the more luxurious caves — luxurious on account of the goat dung littering the floor being relatively dry — that I decided to unpack my sleeping bag. Five minutes later, after finding a ledge for the books I had with me and pouring a little whisky, I declared the place home.

Earlier that day, a ginger-haired man on the mainland assured me that, not far above the rocky scree on Scarba, there’s ‘a wee lochan full of famished trout’. Capitulating to my hunger, I picked up my fishing rod and walked out into the rain.

An hour later, I was still walking and, an hour after that, with darkness beginning to threaten, I traced my way back.

That night, as the flames of my feeble fire threw shadows on the back wall, I shivered in silence and looked at my dog. Not long ago, she would have roamed the island looking for things to kill, but, now, her muzzle grows grey and she only cares for afternoons by the Aga.

‘Fishing with hunger in your belly and despair in your heart is altogether different’
At 8pm, I forced myself into a sleeping bag that had belonged to my brother when he was a Boy Scout of slender build. Lying there half-suffocating, with my nipples exposed to the wind and desperately willing sleep to come, I evaluated Hattie. In 2011, I paid £200 for her as a puppy, so I estimated she’s cost about 0.05p a day — remarkable value for a dog of such kindness.

Then, I awoke. Hoping it was 4am or 5am, I turned over my watch. Painfully, it was just 10pm. The rest of the night followed the same pattern — I would lull myself to sleep with some tedious calculation and then awake an hour later, starving, frightened and cold.

GOOD EATS:

Cooking Peppermint Chiffon Pie with Flannery O’Connor (Valerie Stivers, July 9, 2024, Paris Review)

The owner of the Sanford House restaurant, Mary Jo Thompson, wrote a cookbook in 2008 including some of the restaurant’s most beloved recipes. The book is out of print, but a curator from the Andalusia Farm museum sent me the restaurant’s recipe for the peppermint chiffon pie. To my modern eye, the recipe looked unappetizingly dour. It called for evaporated milk, gelatin, and a premade Keebler’s Chocolate Ready Crust crust. The peppermint flavor and pink color came from melted peppermint hard candy, which I thought would be wishy-washy to the eye and the palate.

I decided to make one version of the pie following Thompson’s recipe, and then also to generate my own blown-out recipe using from-scratch techniques and amped-up retro flavorings. Chiffon pie research online, however, turned up wildly different formulas. The “chiffon” designation is supposed to mean a pie with an airy texture that has been created by mixing a custard base with whipped egg whites. But the most common contemporary recipe I ran across asked for packaged vanilla Jello pudding mixed with Cool Whip. The flavor and color came from food coloring and peppermint extract. It technically wasn’t “chiffon,” and it relied even more on ingredients from packages and cans than the Sanford House version. Eventually I made up my own recipe, making a crust from crushed Oreos, a filling from homemade custard mixed with whipped egg whites and flavored with peppermint extract, and a whipped cream topping mixed with crushed peppermint bark and peppermint candy. I would achieve a pink color with a particularly powerful neon-pink gel food coloring.

The comparison project was slightly hampered by the lack of Keebler Ready Crusts in any of the grocery stores I have access to, so I ended up making Oreo crusts for both the Sanford House pie and my own. Fortunately, having a strict comparison didn’t matter in the end. I didn’t need two recipes because you can’t make a bad peppermint chiffon pie. The Sanford House version was mild, minty, and just sweet enough. Topped with whipped cream and drizzled with chocolate syrup, it was heavenly.

THERE ARE NO SPOTTED OR BARRED OWLS, JUST OWLS:

Hybrids between two species can produce “swarms” that flourish (RICHARD PALLARDY, 7/30/2024, Ars Technica)

When two related species overlap geographically, they may form what are called “hybrid zones.” Some of the most obvious hybrid zones occur at the boundaries of divergent ecosystems. A plant species adapted to one soil type may exchange genes with a related plant adapted to another, and their offspring thus develop a population that thrives in an intermediate area with characteristics of both soil types.

These hybrid zones are often quite stable over time, with insignificant introgression, or breeding back, to the parent populations. That’s because the genes that serve the organisms in the hybrid zone may not be particularly useful to those outside of it, so they do not spread more widely.

Sometimes, however, hybridization events become something more. They turn into swarms. The first instance of the term “hybrid swarm” occurred in 1926 in a Nature article about New Zealand flora.

“As far as biologically defining the difference between that zone and a swarm, I’ve been struggling to find a nice, clean definition,” Fant said.

“A hybrid swarm is the ultimate erosion of two species into some other thing that’s a combination of both,” suggested Scott A. Taylor, an associate professor at the University of Colorado who has worked on hybridization in chickadees.

Sic transit species.

WILLIAM FAULKNER DROVE A JEEP:

Civil rights, presidential politics, the Middle East. For 60 years, he covered it all. Writer Michael Oates Palmer talks violent history, ignorant Republicans, journalism on the brink, Mississippi falling backward, sandwich crackers – and a few choice nitwits – with the great reporter at 83. (Michael Oates Palmer, June 5, 2024, Bitter Southerner)

In the car parked outside a church in the Mississippi Delta, the Nobel Peace Prize winner took a bite of cold chicken. In a packed day of several stops, this was the best opportunity the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. would find to sneak in a quick lunch. It was also the best opportunity for Curtis Wilkie, the 27-year-old reporter for The Clarksdale Press Register, to ask King a question: “Are you ever frightened?”
King was there to stir up support for his Poor People’s Campaign and its planned march on Washington for economic justice. Wilkie had followed him from stop to stop that day, including the tense situation they had just weathered in Marks, a tiny town surrounded by cotton fields.

King was about to take the pulpit of Silent Grove Baptist Church when a disheveled white farmer walked in through the front doors. The farmer reached into his pocket – Wilkie braced himself – only to pull out a $100 bill. He handed it to King. The Civil Rights leader thanked the farmer, who turned to the crowd of 200 and insisted that, contrary to what others told them, Ain’t nobody hungry in Mississippi. Some tense words were exchanged, but the farmer finally left, the standoff defused.

From the shotgun seat of the car, King answered Wilkie. “No, I’m not frightened,” he said. “I move without fear because I know I’m right. I’d be immobilized if I was afraid.”

Wilkie believed him. This was not bravado. King had shown no fear in the confrontation inside the church.

“Besides,” King said, “the climate of violence is gradually decreasing in the South.”

It was March 19, 1968. A little over two weeks later, King would pause his Poor People’s Campaign to make a detour to Memphis to support striking sanitation workers. There, as Wilkie would write more than 50 years after that interview in the Delta, “the modern prophet had an appointment at his personal Golgotha.”

• • •

It’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day, and everything in Oxford, Mississippi, is closed.

That includes the expected public institutions: the post office, the schools, the Lafayette County Courthouse in the center of the square. But Ajax Diner, City Grocery, even the bibliophile’s Valhalla, Square Books – they’re dark today, too. A winter snowstorm had blanketed the town overnight, shutting everything down. With Ole Miss students still on winter break, everything would feel empty anyway. But now? It’s almost eerie.

Driving slowly south of the square, just a few blocks from Rowan Oak, Faulkner’s home, I turn off Lamar, the main drag, and onto a block between streets named Lincoln and Grant. (To further complicate the terrain, Mississippi still pairs MLK Day with the state’s observance of Robert E. Lee’s birthday.)

I pull into the driveway of a handsome single-story cottage, firewood stacked next to the unlocked front door. I let myself in.

I have been here many times. I’ve petted that old gray Persian cat giving me the evil eye from the kitchen counter. I’ve admired and studied the stacked and stocked bookshelves, filled with first editions of novels and biographies and history, most with broken bindings or torn dust jackets. I hear the words come on back, so I walk through the house to its main bedroom.

That’s where I find, in a leather armchair at the foot of a neatly made bed, my reason for coming to Oxford.

He looks much the same as he did when I last saw him, 10 months earlier. Maybe a little thinner. The full head of unruly white hair that resembles that of trial attorney Gerry Spence, or maybe Lyndon Johnson after he left the presidency and let his freak flag fly. The thick beard that, when paired with the scally cap he sometimes wears, makes him look like the featured guest at a Galway poets festival.

And then there’s that voice, one that makes every joke, story, insight, or profanity somehow sound gentle and authoritative at once: coming down from Mount Olympus, only whispered. He says the words that felt like a medal pinned to my chest the first time I heard them, years ago.

“Hey, buddy,” says Curtis Wilkie.

WHO WILL STOP THIS SENSELESS SLAUGHTER?:

Woman in a Red Raincoat (Clellan Coe, July 10, 2024, American Scholar)

In William Trevor’s story “A Meeting in Middle Age,” such a reversal almost happens. The story is about two strangers, a woman and a man. She is an unhappy wife wanting a divorce, which in mid-20th century Ireland meant supplying evidence of adultery. He is a lonely bachelor who, for a fee, agrees to play the part of the co-respondent by spending the night with her in a hotel room. As planned, they meet up on a train, then spend the evening visibly together, first in the hotel bar and then in the grill-room, before retiring to the room for the night. She, Mrs. da Tanka, is the more worldly one. “You must not feel embarrassment,” she tells him early on. “We are beyond the age of giving in to awkwardness in a situation. You surely agree?” Mr. Mileson doesn’t know how he feels.

During the evening, someone makes a wrong comment, someone is impatient, someone is rude, and, little by little, anger builds, bickering erupts, and personal remarks are made by these two strangers. They insult each other. Through the night it continues. Facing each other the next day in an empty carriage of the train, it goes on. Mrs. da Tanka taunts him with his solitary life. “When you die, Mr. Mileson, have you a preference for the flowers on your coffin? It is a question I ask because I might send you off a wreath. That lonely wreath. From ugly, frightful Mrs. da Tanka.”

Mr. Mileson, who has tried on other occasions to imagine his funeral, is taken off guard and answers. “Cow-parsley, I suppose.”

“Cow-parsley?” she echoes. She is surprised. She remembers cow-parsley from her happy childhood days. She remembers sitting in the sun amid bunches of it. “Why did you say cow-parsley?” she asks him, twice. He doesn’t know, and he doesn’t answer. She tries to say something, but after the night they have passed, she can find no words that fit. She looks at him, imagining a different outcome to their meeting. She pictures them strolling out of the hotel, arm-in-arm, discussing and agreeing which direction to turn. On the train, he senses something and wants to speak, but his suspicion of her is too strong, and the words die on his lips. The two go on in silence. They leave the train together at their stop, then separate. The love affair that might have developed never gets a start, both people having joined in to ruin a chance.