Early in COVID lockdown this spring, Americans enjoyed watching penguins pause their role as aquarium attractions to temporarily become commanders of the gaze. First they waddled the halls of Chicago’s Shedd Aquarium to have a gander at their fellow marine life. Then another waddle from the Kansas City Zoo ventured to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art for a look-see.

Suddenly we thought a lot about animals captive in zoos because we had ourselves become captive. The parallels could not be starker: the primary complaint of zookeepers is the incessant drudgery of shoveling out feces; our own obsession at that time was hoarding toilet paper.

I was recently sitting between friends, a couple, at a movie theater, waiting out the seemingly endless stream of commercials for Peak TV filler. The he of the couple would lean across me to whisper “Yes” or “No” to his partner in regard to giving some series a go. They were usually in alignment, but when it came to Amazon’s Carnival Row, he vehemently declared “NO.” She worked in theater lighting; “Yes,” she countered. He was resolute: “Nothing—with—wings.”

His reaction owed to the fact that he taught an undergraduate short story writing course in which his students were solely interested in fantasy—lots of dragons and interspecies wing-flappers, lots of GOT homage. (This is a school where the tuition is well over $50,000.) His students explained their decisions as partly lucrative (“there’s a lot of money in YA fantasy”) and partly to express themselves, to put their “rampant imagination” on display. When responding in class to a story about a gender-fluid elf, my friend brought the Wrath of Kahn down upon himself by asking “Aren’t all elves gender fluid?”

In my early twenties, I was seduced by the trees and nighttime illumination of the Belgian painter René Magritte, and in Le Seize Septembre I found the best of both. This 1956 painting shows a tree at the last moments of dusk, but the crescent moon shines not from above but from the heart of the tree, casting a strange light onto the surrounding ground.

I will always associate my secondhand Magritte monograph featuring this painting with an old paperback of Alan Watts’s The Wisdom of Insecurity (1951) because I bought them at the same time. Having been raised Catholic, I was ready to shed the dogma but still wanted to have faith in something. Watts—a British Zen Buddhist who gained renown in the San Francisco Bay area in the fifties and sixties—had something of a renaissance in the eighties, and The Wisdom of Insecurity was considered essential reading.

There were many parts of summer I hated when growing up. From fourth through eighth grade, playing in the local Cinderella Softball League required that you practice next to a sewage treatment plant in a swampy valley that was buggy in addition to stinking to high heaven. I had a slew of untreated pollen allergies, which meant rubbing my red eyes with my right hand while swatting away mosquitos with my mitt.

Though I grew up in a small city, I had plenty of access to what we called “the sticks.” I had no overriding passion for rural America, probably because in Western New York, rural meant poor. But thanks to novels, stories, and paintings, I fell in love with the summer landscapes of pre-industrial America.