It’s a sunny morning in Juneau, Alaska, and my motorcycle is parked just outside of my favorite coffee shop in town, The Rookery Cafe. Excited voices of my contemporaries fill the air around me, but I am lost in a heartening reverie.

I am reconnecting with an old friend, Yoshida Kenko, a soulmate of sorts. He lived in medieval Japan and gifted his future acquaintances with simple, short “Essays in Idleness.” I hope you enjoy Essay 13 as much as I did this morning. I hope its roughly 800 year echo resonates in your heart as it does now, in mine.

It is most a wonderful comfort to sit alone neath a lamp, book spread before you, and commune with someone from the past whom you have never met.

As to books—those loving volumes of Wenxuan, the Wenji of Bai Juyi, the words of Laozi and Zhuangzi. There are many moving works from our own land, too, by scholars of former times.