Helen DeWitt ate my newsletter.

Hello!

I fully intended to send out this newsletter in the first week of August, and then the second week of August. It kept not happening.  There are external factors: I was preparing my children for seventh and tenth grade, planning my daughter’s bat mitzvah, winding down a job that I’ve had for 11 years. Here in Austin, we’ve had a week of temperatures over 100 degrees. It never really cools down at night. The air is thick and sluggish, even at 7:30 a.m. In the afternoons, I feel about as sentient as a lump of dough. It doesn’t help that my 48-year-old body has some kind of inner heat lamp that goes on and off, of its own accord, at random intervals throughout the day and night.

In her essay, “Against August,” Haley Mlotek (according to the author’s Instagram, it’s pronounced “melodic”) makes my point for me: “In August I cannot think, so I cannot work.”

Physically, August is a slog. But unlike Mlotek, I do not oppose August. August is the last gasp of summer. It feels like death, but it sets the stage for resurrection, a new school year, the Jewish high holidays with their promise of apples and atonement. August is shavasana. I’m not listless; I’m in a state of suspended animation.

There is a stack of promising unread novels in the living room; earlier this month, I thought I would write about one of them. But after weeks of avoiding their side-eye as I passed them on my way to flop on the couch, I decided August was not the month for new things. Instead, I reread one of my favorite novels, Helen DeWitt’s The Last Samurai.

The Last Samurai, which was first published in 2000, is the story of Sybilla, a single mother who was born in America but lives in England, and her son, Ludo, which is not the name on his birth certificate. Sybilla is not the kind of woman who cares about official birth records or compulsory education. Having studied classical languages at Oxford, Sybilla educates Ludo like John Stuart Mill was educated by his father. (An education described in Mill’s Autobiography.) She teaches him Greek at age four, and it