Diary

Virginia  Christmas will be different this year. Our refrigerator’s death was like Socrates’s: it began at the bottom and moved gradually upward, eventually yielding up its Freon eide to the empyrean, or at least the ozone hole. Such a death in early November raises big questions about holiday-making, or would most years, with Thanksgiving upon us and Christmas not far behind. But with COVID rampant, we’re admonished to stay home, and will, which dovetails conveniently with the fact that because of the virus, supply chains are banjaxed and we won’t get our new fridge till Boxing Day. (And refrigerator boxes are the best boxes, so there’s the grandchildren’s Christmas taken care of.

Easton, Maryland Three weeks before the election, I went to an event here in Easton where writers of various kinds — journalists, historians, speechwriters — read texts about political rhetoric and discussed them around a seminar table. Is rhetoric a set of tricks, as Socrates said, or an art, as Aristotle would have it? Lately politicians seem so constrained by propriety that they cannot say anything at all. Barack Obama ended his speech to the Democratic National Convention in August with ‘God bless.’ Sorry, God bless what? America? Joe Biden? Or did someone sneeze? In front of the Talbot County Courthouse in Easton is a beautiful monument to the 85 ‘Talbot Boys’ who fought in the Civil War.