We had brunch recently at the restaurant part of Lakewood which bills itself as "The Longest Running Summer Theater in the Nation". It was quite the thing back in the day. Last week it ended its season early and abruptly when the lead actor had a heart attack and died on stage in full costume. The butterflies keep coming to the zinnias in the pollinator garden at the library.

In book group last week we compared two epistolary novels. I admired the craft of The Correspondent, and was wowed again by a reread of This is How We Lose the Time War. Red's take on letter writing: "It’s all a bit counterintuitive, this business of communication through base matter. Closing a letter—a physical object without even a ghost in the cloud, all that data on one frail piece of paper—with an even more malleable substance, bearing, of all things, an ideographic signature! Informing any handler of the message’s sender, her role, perhaps even her purpose! Madness—from an operational-security perspective." And on email: "the instant handshake of slow telepathy through our wires.""

The Gentleman Netflix series is about British aristocrats turned gangsters who maintain their expensive estates and lifestyles by growing marijuana. The dialogue is quick and literate with a lot of theological references, and the plot is a reference to Esau & Jacob in the bible as well as the kings of Troy. Maybe violent gangster aristocrats are the closest thing we have to the nation states of both the bible and ancient Greek stories. The character played by Giancarlo Esposito is like a oracle telling Eddie he is the direct descendant of King Priam of Troy.

Two things that happened today: a walk through the old Quimby Library at the defunct campus with Abraham, the young contractor guy who will be making the changes that turn the campus into a Jewish camp. He messaged me earlier to remind me that they don't shake hands with women. I forgot to ask if women could be rabbis in his sect, but just as well because that might lead to asking if women could be god. We identified a few things we would like to have and agreed to set a date for a library team to take the whole day and select maybe 100 books. There are probably 60,000 books there. Walking through a dead building on a dead campus was sad and weird. The ghosts of the lively days there were all around.

The day ended with a talk by one of my heroes, Randall Liberty, Maine's Commissioner of Corrections. He grew up poor in a nearby town, and his father was in and out of prison. In the course of his time as warden of the Maine State Prison (think Shawshank) and commissioner, he transformed the prisons from violent and cruel practices to places where a "resident" could actually rehabilitate and be prepared for re-entry into society. Harari says that if you want to help the maximum number of people, invent a vaccine. But there is a lot to be said for the widening circles of benefit when you transform an institution, starting with the families of the incarcerated and the society with one less criminal and spreading to the next generations.