From the Easy Chair, Volume 2

George William Curtis wrote these essays in an age when thoughtful people still gathered in parlors to discuss the deeper currents of life, and Volume 2 of From the Easy Chair captures that vanished art perfectly. The book opens with a quietly devastating meditation on New Year's Eve: Curtis treats the last night of the year as a kind of requiem, a moment when we stand at the border between who we were and who we might become. He writes about aging, about the strange melancholy and hope that accompany any ending, and he does so with a poet's ear and a philosopher's honesty. The essays that follow range across American manners, public life, and the enduring puzzle of how to live well. There is a piece on Ralph Waldo Emerson that captures the heat and light of a great friendship, and scattered throughout are observations on society that still have the power to make a modern reader pause and recognize something true. This is not a book to rush through. It is meant for slow mornings, for the quiet hour before sleep, for anyone who remembers that reading used to be a form of thinking and not just consuming.