As I worked on this issue, I kept returning to a line in Dennis McCann’s piece on lighthouse keeper and photographer Emmanuel Luick. Luick’s first wife, Ella, occasionally used the lighthouse log to pen short, personal entries during the long winter months on Sand Island. “I haven’t anything whatever to do,” she wrote on November 23, 1898, “and time goes slowly.”
My twenty-first-century self has a hard time imagining this. In the flurry of school lunches, snowy commutes, page proofs, and edits that make up my days, I can barely remember what it feels like to have no hovering deadline, no to-do list, no uphill, winding road to climb. And yet, more than a century apart, Ella and I have something in common: we both desire to have our hours…
