Gotham Diary:
End and Ongoing
16 September 2011
By the end of the day — long before the end of the afternoon, I hope — it will not be possible to take another version of this photograph. This pretty if untidy arrangement of books, papers, globe and mahogany will come to an end, and another arrangement, perhaps more useful than picturesque, will take its place. I should tell you more about it, but I am busy at the moment, searching Virginia Woolf’s Common Reader essay on Jane Austen (in the book atop the pile of three) for the epigram about how hard it is to catch Austen in the act of greatness, a remark with which Richard Jenkyns (in the middle) disagrees, and which Rachel Brownstein (bottom), acknowledging Jenkyns in her notes, paraphrases.