Suzanne Stewart's "Down Lighthouse Road"

Illustration by Dave Cutler, from Suzanee Stewart's "Down Lighthouse Road"

One of the most enjoyable pieces I’ve read this fall is Suzanne Stewart’s "Down Lighthouse Road" (Literary Review of Canada, October, 2026). It’s an account of Stewart’s two-week stay at Port Bickerton Lighthouse on Nova Scotia’s rugged Eastern Shore.  Stewart writes,

As the artist-in-residence at the Port Bickerton light station, I would stay for two weeks in this sequestered setting: the home of an old illustrious lighthouse (now a museum), a modern automated one at its side, the former lightkeeper’s residence near the two structures, and twenty hectares of forest, bog, beach, and unspoiled shoreline in Guysborough County, on Nova Scotia’s Eastern Shore. In the spirit of the keepers and their families, I would anchor myself in isolation, at a formidable elevation over the Atlantic Ocean, at Barachois Head, the narrow entrance to the harbour.

As she points out, the Port Bickerton site is unique in hosting two lighthouses: one built in 1930 that’s been converted into a museum; and one built in the 1960s that still functions. Stewart says,

Miraculously, on the brightest mornings, both towers appear to be lit: the old historic building, which lacks a lantern now, receiving and reflecting light from the sun on its east-facing square tower windows and white wooden walls, as if a wick has been kindled. The natural light is more brilliant, somehow, than the intermittent flash from the functioning lamp, which dims automatically as the day begins.

Stewart is drawn to the older of the two lighthouses. She says,

The 1930 lighthouse is certainly the star, exuding a personality and a character of its own, not only in its radiance, when sunlight glimmers on the glass in its tower, but also in its elegant design. One of the few remaining structures of its kind in Nova Scotia, it features a combined dwelling for living and maintaining the beacon: that is, a home in one space for both the keepers and their labours. Not the familiar “pepper pot” model, the square design is classic for its era. The building resembles, some say, a white country church, with the lantern gallery standing in for a sacred bell tower.

She describes its interior:

When stepping inside, a visitor envisions a family inhabiting and working within the simple but functional interior: a former living room, kitchen, and porch for wood and handwashed laundry on the main floor; three modest bedrooms on the second level; two steep vertical ladders with railings — twelve rungs, then a turn, then seven steps more — that lead to the third-floor lantern room; and, finally, a magnificent view from the top, with the Atlantic Ocean in three directions and woodlands in the fourth. Additional windows on the lower floors, most of them facing east, from where the harshest weather arrives, offer a thin barrier between the intricate domestic and operational interior space and the wild, elemental conditions around it.

She also sees beauty in the other lighthouse:

While not the star of the Port Bickerton light station, the modern functioning lighthouse — self-driving like a clock and never inhabited — has a beauty of its own, with the lantern gallery as its prettiest feature. A slender tower, equally metal and glass, sparkles in darkness or at twilight or in fog. Like a diamond, I thought, some days. Or a crystal. Or a star. Or the moon. Not overbearing but reassuring. I would rise in the middle of the night to watch it rotate, spinning and spinning — what could rival a flash in the gloom? — as I intuited its musicality: an instrument finely tuned and impeccably designed.

I love her “doubled vision of the doubled towers” - 

the first leaning on the second, so to speak, not only in the mornings when one reflects the rays from the rising sun, while the other revolves unreservedly regardless of weather, but also in the evenings, when the setting sun is aligned horizontally with the two structures, the elegant shape of the elder casting its shadow on the younger.

“Down Lighthouse Road” is a vivid, lyrical meditation on the meaning and beauty of the Port Bickerton Lighthouse. Highly recommended.

A. O. Scott on John Berger

A. O. Scott, in his “The Man Who Taught Us How to Pay Attention” (The New York Times Magazine, October 18, 2026), says of John Berger, “For him, attention was not a passive, individual state but rather an action.” I like that. To me, that’s what Berger’s photography essays are – acts of attention. See, for example, his excellent “Paul Strand” (included in his 2013 collection Understanding a Photograph), in which he says of Strand,

His best photographs are unusually dense – not in the sense of being overburdened or obscure, but in the sense of being filled with an unusual amount of substance per square inch. And all this substance becomes the stuff of the life of the subject. Take the famous portrait of Mr. Bennett from Vermont, New England. His jacket, his shirt, the stubble on his chin, the timber of the house behind, the air around him become in this image the face of his life, of which his actual facial expression is the concentrated spirit.

I think what Scott means when he says Berger’s attention is a form of action is that it involves more than just looking. Scott says, “We don’t just see what’s in front of our eyes. We interpret it, looking for patterns and meanings and associations. How we do this depends on where we are, who we’re with and how we see ourselves.”

I like Scott’s emphasis on art’s subjectivity. He says, 

Even as the world of commodities is ruled by equivalence, part of the allure of a painting lies in its uniqueness. A Caravaggio is not the same as a Courbet. You can’t swap Picasso for Francis Bacon. What that means is that art — even art that is anonymously made or consumed en masse — is personal. Somebody made it. Somebody sees it.

I also agree with Scott’s view that “Right now, we’re in the midst of an attention crisis, individually and collectively snared in an infinite scroll of disruption and distraction.” He says, “We’re in danger of forgetting how to look.” Our eyes are glued to computer screens, as mine are right now as I type this. We seem to prefer virtual reality over the real thing. I constantly have to remind myself to close the laptop, put the phone away, get out there in nature, in the real world, and see what’s going on.  

Credit: The above portrait of John Berger is by Mike McQuade.

October 5, 2026, Issue

Here’s a New Yorker that deserves not a review but a party. It contains five excellent pieces: Helen Rosner’s “Tables for Two: Ugly Baby”; Ryan Gellis’s “Bar Tab: Mash Inn”; Nick Paumgarten’s “Ice Ages”; Anthony Lane’s “Borderlands”; and Peter Hessler’s “Danger Drive.”

Rosner, in her piece, visits the Thai restaurant Ugly Baby in Williamsburg. She loved it. She calls it “a place of unbearable sensory chaos.” She says,

I dived right into the deep end, ordering without fear: a soft stir-fry of ground pork belly, umami-charged with shrimp paste and garnished with slivers of tomato-red hot peppers, whose heat crackled and blossomed against a caramel sweetness in the sauce. A salad of whole strawberries and bird’s-eye chilies, in a glaze-like dressing of sugar and fish sauce, was uncannily dessert-like—Would I like this on ice cream? I kept wondering—and yet certainly not a dessert, with all its thunderous layers of sourness and fishy-breathed complexity. I wished that I was in a quieter room when I took a bite of the pad ped, a dry curry of hanger steak and slippery tripe: it was rich and deep as nighttime, with a holy-basil brightness swaddled in some of the most violent heat I’ve ever experienced.

Gellis’s piece tells about his recent visit to a beer bar in South Slope called Mash Inn that was formerly a laundromat. Gellis says, “Inside, people were still dealing in suds, albeit of a different kind.” He has a few beers, including a “Cultivar: Cascade, from Wayward Lane Brewing, a hazy pale ale whose tiny bubbles effervesced so vigorously as to mist the upper lip” and “a wild ale by the name of Arietta, from Fox Farm Brewery, floral and largely flat, had a pleasing barnyard funk.” He also drinks something called a “Subglitch sour” – great name, but he doesn’t describe it other than to say that he and “the malt maestros” he’s drinking with rechristened it “Jolly Rancher light.” When Gellis leaves the bar, he stops at the outside window (“its sliding partition reminiscent of a Mister Softee’s”) and buys another drink. He concludes, “A growler of stout makes for pleasant company on the walk home.”

Paumgarten’s “Ice Ages” is a “Personal History” piece about his life in minor hockey – first as a kid and then as a father. It’s a vivid meditation on hockey and parenting. Here’s a sample:

It wasn’t long before Oli joined a travel-hockey program. Day One was at a rink in a mall up the pike, in New Rochelle. This was mini-mites, five- and six-year-olds, mostly, the smallest of the small. We drove up at daybreak, Oli in back, still in a booster seat. When we got to the rink and he started dressing, I could see the trepidation and doubt in his eyes. Older kids strutted around in their pads. Their dads made a caffeinated ruckus. I tried, in Oli’s presence, to convert the boisterousness and swagger of the others into cheerfulness, but I could sense that he knew I was forcing a mood. This never worked with him. Something gave way, some dismay set off by the jersey he was given or the number he’d chosen or the bravado of the other children or the merrymaking of the parents or the nervous exhilaration of his dad—those first-day heebie-jeebies, one’s own memory of which persists deep in the bones. He refused to go on the ice, and he wept. My moonfaced boy, wrecked somehow by a disconnect between what he’d wanted and what this was, dug in. Other dads sidled up and tried to coax and reassure him, but, if I couldn’t, they didn’t stand a chance. We sat awhile. Limbo. My heart ached for the boy, yet the task at hand was to get him onto the ice and into the program. The striving, the striving. He sat on a bench, his tiny legs not even reaching the floor. I left him alone for a while and stood at the glass watching the session, my soul a twist of sympathy, frustration, embarrassment, and even something like fear—that he might be too sensitive for this world, too soft—and the realization that I might feel this way about sensitivity, about the proper mettle in a boy, made me ashamed, too, so the brain, the self-justifying cortex, whichever lobe that is, got to work formulating arguments on behalf of my impatience and stipulations, to override the shame. 

There are wonderful descriptions of minor hockey reality. This one, for example:

Before practice, as the Zamboni made its rounds, the boys piled up behind the door to the ice, jostling for position. After a moment—the sanctified fermata of waiting for the new layer of water to freeze—a coach unlatched the door and they tumbled onto the ice, not one remaining on his skates. The pads, the helmets, the sticks, the bounded ring: it was all a pretext for roughhousing. No one discouraged it.

And this:

My participation, as driver, dad, coach, manager, crank, and fan, sucked the strength out of me, like going overboard in a wintry sea. The rank refrigerated air, the burnt coffee, the Tastykakes, the cross-chop of excitement and stress and boredom and disgruntlement. By Monday, I was saturated by it all, sallow and hoarse.

My favorite scene takes place in Paumgarten’s apartment. His five-year-old son Oli suits up for hockey for the first time:

In the apartment, I helped him tug on gear and tighten straps with the brisk tenderness of a veterinarian tending to a sedated pet. His excitement, visible behind the lattice of the face mask, was intoxicating, the pride of a novitiate. The extent to which even this kind of innocent dress-up is a means of indoctrination—the knottiness of this early gender programming—is leavened or perhaps obscured by its adorableness. He bumped around the house, proud and almost delirious with his transformation, and with the cognizance that he might be pleasing his father. The armor both emboldened him and somehow sapped him of strength, as though the plastic exoskeleton had drawn starch from his bones. After a few minutes, he lay on the floor with arms out and legs splayed, and looked up at the ceiling, daydreaming of who knows what. Every frozen pond has one, a distrait child squinting into the sky, making angels of the ice shavings. Here, in the one-and-a-half-bedroom apartment, was ours.

That “Every frozen pond has one, a distrait child squinting into the sky, making angels of the ice shavings” is inspired! The whole piece is inspired – one of Paumgarten’s best.

Anthony Lane’s “Borderlands” is a profile of the Polish film director Pawel Pawlikowski. Lane not only sketches Pawlikowski’s personal history, he talks with him, has lunch with him, and meets him in Sarajevo to visit a location that figures centrally in Pawlikowski’s documentary Serbian Epics (1992). For me, the best part of Lane’s piece is his review of Pawlikowski’s films, including Ida (2013) – one of my favorite movies: see my “Minimal Realism in Pawel Pawlikowski’s Ida” (August 6, 2014). How did Pawlikowski create that minimal realism? What was his approach? Lane provides an insight. He writes,

Ida’s stillness is shared by the whole film, which seems more confidently rooted than anything in Pawlikowski’s previous endeavors. “For the first time, I was really on firm ground with what I wanted,” he said. He was back on home turf, in Poland, with a narrow budget, discarding inessentials. “When you limit the elements and actors and locations and props, then you can drill in,” he told me. “Limit yourself, and that frees you up.” Objects become loaded with intent; a skull is unearthed and bundled inside a silk scarf. Pawlikowski describes all this as “a big breakthrough,” though it sounds more like an epiphany. “I also had this moment of rejection of cinema, you know? I said, ‘Fuck cinema.’ ” Part of the rejecting was what he calls “this radical decision not to move the camera, and to frame things in a very amateurish way, with a lot of headroom.” The aim was “to make things happen within the shot.”

Lane’s stimulating piece kindled my interest in seeing Pawlikowski’s latest film Fatherland. 

Peter Hessler’s “Danger Drive” has a terrific subject – a highway that has made lists of both the most dangerous and the most appealing roads in America. It’s called the Million Dollar Highway. Hessler describes it in his opening paragraph:

In the valley where I live, along a quiet stretch of the Uncompahgre River, in southwestern Colorado, there is only one paved road, and, like most people around here, I don’t drive it south without a good reason. In that direction, the road—U.S. Highway 550—passes through the small mountain town of Ouray, and then it climbs more than two thousand feet in the span of six miles. This section of the two-lane road has been carved directly into the red-quartzite cliffs of the Uncompahgre Gorge, and almost none of it has a shoulder; in some places, the highway is only twenty-three feet wide. The speed limit is twenty-five miles an hour, and one way to identify locals is that they often drive faster than that. This is because they worry about what can happen above the road. Rockfalls are common, and so are avalanches. 

Hessler tells about the highway’s history and the many accidents and fatalities that have occurred on it. The piece is beautifully structured. One accident in particular draws Hessler’s close attention – a Honda Civic that inexplicably stops, reverses, and backs off the road, plunging three hundred and twenty feet to the bottom of a gorge. Here’s his description of what happened:

Last year, early on the morning of August 5th, a tourist from Oregon named Adam Hynes was approaching one of the most treacherous sections of the gorge when he looked ahead and saw a silver Honda Civic moving in reverse. Hynes found it strange that somebody would be driving backward in such a spot, but then his view was obscured as he went around a sharp bend. By the time Hynes came out of the turn, the Honda was gone.

Hynes dropped a pin on his phone. There was no signal, so he continued down the highway until he was able to call 911. Then he circled back and parked at a pullout not far from the pin. The gorge was so precipitous that Hynes couldn’t see the bottom, but he had a DJI Mavic 3 drone. He set the machine aloft, and its camera captured the Honda, which had fallen three hundred and twenty feet—about the height of a thirty-story building. The silver vehicle lay upside down in the Uncompahgre River, crumpled like an aluminum can.

Hessler’s account of this accident and the ensuing rescue of one of the car’s occupants, a ten-year-old girl named Rachelle, is riveting. It’s amazing what he does to pursue the story. He climbs down into the gorge and crosses it on a rope known as a Tyrolean traverse to get to a ledge that affords a good view of the Honda crash site. He also drives the Million Dollar Highway on his way to visit Rachelle at her home in Bloomfield, New Mexico. 

“Danger Drive” is a superb piece of literary journalism. I enjoyed it immensely.

Acts of Seeing: Robinson's Island

Photo by John MacDougall

I took this picture a few days ago on Robinson’s Island – one of my favorite places. I biked there from our home in Stanhope. There’s a beautiful trail that takes you there across marsh, along dunes, until you get to the island, which is connected to the mainland by a narrow causeway. No vehicles are allowed, just walkers and cyclists. The day I was there, I had the place to myself. The beach on the north side of the island was strewn with wrecked lobster traps – one of my favorite camera subjects. They’re like found sculptures made of wood, net, and rope – smashed by the waves into unique configurations. They don’t last. The tide comes in, moves them around on the rocks, and breaks them apart. I see them as symbols. This is the way life goes. 

Megahn O'Rourke on Anne Carson's "Nox"

Anne Carson (Photo by Einar Falur Ingólfsson)

Congratulations to Anne Carson for winning the 2026 Nobel Prize for Literature. She’s been contributing to The New Yorker since 1997. See, for example, “Father’s Old Blue Cardigan” (November 10, 1997), “Stanzas, Sexes, Seductions” (December 3, 2001), “Short Talk on Herbology” (April 22, 2013), “Clive Song” (August 7 & 14, 2017), “Life” (June 28, 2021), “What Happened to New York” (May 5, 2025). I confess I’m not a fan. I find her too metaphysical. That’s my problem, not hers. I’ll have to give her a second look.

Carson is the subject of one of The New Yorker’s best poetry reviews – Megahn O’Rourke’s “The Unfolding” (July 12 & 19, 2000). It’s a review of Carson’s Nox. O’Rourke describes it as follows:

“Nox” is as much an artifact as a piece of writing. The contents arrive not between two covers but in a box about the size of the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible. Inside is an accordion-style, full-color reproduction of the notebook, which incorporates pasted-in photographs, poems, collages, paintings, and a letter Michael once wrote home, along with fragments typed by Carson. The reproduction has been done painstakingly, and conjures up an almost tactile sense of the handmade original. A mourner is always searching for traces of the lost one, and traces of that scrapbook’s physicality—bits of handwriting, stamps, stains—add testimonial force: this person existed.

That is a brilliant description! I’ve never forgotten it. 

O’Rourke wrote one of my favorite poems – “My Aunts” (The New Yorker, July 20, 2009). Here it is:

Grew up on the Jersey Shore in the nineteen-seventies.
Always making margaritas in the kitchen,
always laughing and doing their hair up pretty,
sharing lipstick and shoes and new juice diets;
always splitting the bills to the last penny,
stealing each other’s clothes,
loving one another then complaining
as they walked out the door. Each one with her doe eyes,
each one younger than the last,
each older the next year, one year
further from their girlhoods of swimming
at Sandy Hook, doing jackknives off the diving board
after school, all of them
being loved by one boy and then another,
all driving further from the local fair, further from Atlantic City.
They used to smoke in their cars,
rolling the windows down and letting their red nails
hang out, little stoplights:
Stop now, before the green
comes to cover up your tall brown bodies.

That “doing jackknives off the diving board after school” is inspired! The whole poem is inspired! It has the breath of life.

Peter Matthiessen's Magnificent "The Snow Leopard"

If you are interested in the ways and means of factual writing, as I am, Peter Matthiessen’s The Snow Leopard is a must read. Yet for many years, I resisted it. Why? Because it has the reputation of being about a spiritual quest. I’m not a spiritual person. I consider myself a realist. I’m allergic to magical thinking. 

There is a lot of Zen in The Snow Leopard. But it’s only one strand in the book’s rich fabric. Other strands are nature, travel, and adventure – all of which I relish. The Snow Leopard is an unforgettable account of a gruelling expedition that Matthiessen and field biologist George Schaller undertook, in 1973, into the remote mountains of Nepal to study the Himalayan blue sheep and possibly glimpse the rare and beautiful snow leopard.

Four things I love about The Snow Leopard:

1. It’s written in the first person major.

The book is an account of personal experience, which, for me, is the most real form of writing. Apparently Matthiessen’s use of “I” in The Snow Leopard was a departure from his usual approach. Maggie Doherty, in her “Rambling Man” (The New Yorker, October 20, 2025), says,

But what truly distinguishes the book is its personal nature. From early in his journalistic career, Matthiessen had abhorred the use of the first person, which he associated with a “National Geographic style of expedition writing,” sensational and unserious. In “The Snow Leopard,” however, he lets the “I” lead the way, offering access to his inner life, even as he questions the entire concept of the self. 

2. It’s written in the present tense.

No verb form conveys immediacy better than present tense. Matthiessen’s use of it in The Snow Leopard is inspired! Here are some examples:

I sit back in straw and dung warmth against the sunny stones. A brilliant black-red beetle comes, and a husky grasshopper, rubbing its fiery legs. A crow flaps to a cedar by the river, and the crow’s wings, too, are filled with the hard silver light of the Himalaya.

GS lingers and I keep on climbing, then pause to drink and wash in a mountain brook. Greenfinches come, and a hawk flies down the valley. Asters and everlasting, lavender and white; the soft humming of a bumblebee consoles me. Sitting awhile on a warm rock, I enjoy the view of Yamarkhar as it comes into the sun. At this season, the flat roofs are bright with the fire colors of the harvest, which will sustain the inhabitants through the long winter – yellow squash, red peppers, bronze tobacco, a red millet, maize, and hemp, which is used for twine and cooking oil as well as marijuana. 

The path enters a narrowing ravine that climbs to a higher cleft between boulders, and the cleft is reached at the strike of the rising sun, which fills this portal with a blinding light. I emerge in a new world and stare about me. A labyrinth of valley mounts toward the snows, for the Himalaya is as convoluted as a brain.

3. It’s structured as a diary.

Each chapter is a day in the journey, beginning on September 28 and ending on December 1. I love this type of structure – chronological, sequential. The journey determines the shape of the narrative. To me it’s the most natural (and real) form of narrative – much preferable to thematic structure. 

4. It brims with wonderful descriptions of nature.

This, for example:

At a canyon bend stands the headman of Tarakot, who wears Hindu puttees and carries no pack of any kind. He is pointing at the bouldered slopes across the stream. “Na!” he cries. “Na!” Then he goes on. A pale form jumps across a gully, followed quickly by six more; the animals move up a steep slope to a haze of green between the rocks and snow. I watch them climb until, at snow line, they are swept up and consumed by clouds that have rushed up the valley from the south: this wonderful silver-gray-blue creature in the bharal, the blue sheep of the Himalaya – in Tibetan, na – that we have come so far to see.

And this:

Higher, where the snow has melted, a hill fox jumps from tussock grass and runs to a group of rocks, then turns to watch. Its black points and rich red coat are set off by a frosty face and chest and an extraordinary long thick tail, dark brown and black with a white fluffy tip; the tip remains visible long after the creature’s glowing colors sink among the stones.

Joy Williams, in her “ ‘A Fury of Dark Energies’ ” (The New York Review of Books, September 24, 2026), says that Matthiessen’s “greatest attribute as a writer” was his “keen attention to the natural world.” Based on my reading of The Snow Leopard, I’d say she’s right.

Credit: The above portrait of Peter Matthiessen by Andrea Ventura is from Joy Williams' " 'A Fury of Dark Energies' " (The New York Review of Books, September 24, 2026). 

Kogonado's Brilliant "Columbus"

Haley Lu Richardson and John Cho in Columbus (Photo by Elisa Christian)

Richard Brody’s wonderful “Revisiting Columbus, A Thrilling Drama of Growing Up Modernist” (newyorker.com, June 20, 2026) inspired me to revisit it, too. I watched it last night. What a great movie! I first saw it in 2017, when it came out. I liked it then. I like it even more now. It’s a coming-of-age story set in Columbus, Ohio. Columbus is home to a remarkable collection of renowned works of modern architecture. (I didn’t know this until I saw this movie.) The protagonist, a recent high-school graduate named Casey, seems stuck in place. Instead of leaving for college, she’s living with her mother and working at the local library. It turns out she’s staying home to help her mother (Michelle Forbes), a recovering drug addict who works two jobs (at a factory and as an office cleaner) to keep afloat. 

But Casey is something of a closet prodigy – growing up in Columbus, she’s become a connoisseur of its architectural treasures. When Casey meets Jin (John Cho), the son of an elderly Korean architect, a friendship soon develops despite their difference in age and experience, and Casey, “finding an intellectual peer, unleashes her enthusiastic architectural insights, reveals her prodigious intellect, and reignites long-dormant ambitions” (from Brody’s earlier “Highlights from the 2017 Sundance Film Festival” (newyorker.com, January 25, 2017).  

What I love about this movie is the way it blends architecture with story. It’s almost as if the director, Kogonada, set out to make a documentary about Columbus’s architecture and decided to tell a story at the same time. Brody writes, “The locations aren’t just picturesque settings for action but part of the subject—as if the film were both a fictional drama and a documentary about the locale.” Yes, exactly. 

Better than any other film I can think of, Columbus captures what it means to respond to something aesthetically. Brody says, “From the movie’s engaging story to its very texture, Kogonada has crafted a singular and startlingly original cinematic vision.” I agree. I think Columbus is destined to become a classic.