The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Thursday, November 27, 2025

Donors Wanted to ‘Keep the Holiday Lights On’ for Struggling Families
Flagler Cares is in the midst of its Second Annual “Keep the Holiday Lights On” campaign. The health and social care coordinating organization is inviting residents and businesses to support local families in need of a modest financial bridge to keep their power on this holiday season. This initiative encourages neighbors to help neighbors by sponsoring homes to ensure struggling families can keep their lights on through December. The goal is to sponsor 100 homes at $100 per home, covering one month’s electric bill for families who might otherwise face utility cut-offs during the holidays. Supporters are welcome to contribute any amount to help brighten the season for their fellow residents. Donations can be made now through the end of the year on the “Keep the Holiday Lights On” webpage at www.flaglercares.org/holiday. Check donations may also be mailed or dropped off at Flagler Cares, 160 Cypress Point Parkway, Suite B302, Palm Coast, FL 32164. As homes are sponsored, donors can watch the campaign’s progress online as homes on the page light up — a symbol of the community’s shared compassion and care.

 

Thanksgiving Byblos: Henry James’s “Traveling Companions” is just shy of novella length. It ran in two parts in the November and December Atlantic of 1870. This appraisal is also in two parts. You can read the second part tomorrow.

The story could have been titled “Calvary.” Brooks is an American student in a German university (at Interlaken, sister city of Putnam County’s Interlachen), vacationing in Italy and doing what Henry James characters do on vacation: visiting museums. The story opens with a lyrical appraisal of Leonardo’s Last Supper at the Convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan, insightful especially for its characterizations of the late 15th century painting’s “tragic twilight of its ruin,” of the  “vague outlines and incurable scars; enough remains to place you in sympathy with the unfathomable wisdom of the painter.” You wonder if James, master of the musty unsaid, is not coyly referring to himself. He runs into an American pair admiring the Supper, the “more than pretty enough” Charlotte of Araminta, N.J., and her old, worn father, Mark Evans. (There is no such town; Araminta was the slave first name of Harriet Tubman, who appears to have nothing to do with this story, though with James you never know.) So begins, with that Last Supper scene, the first in a series of Stations-of-the-Cross-like artistic illustrations of Brooks’s next few weeks as he courts Charlotte. It doubles the pleasure of the story to keep an iPad handy to look up the many paintings referenced as Charlotte, once betrothed to a man who did not return from the Civil War, keeps him at arm’s length. She’s not playing hard to get as much as, like that other Civil War veteran, Oliver Wendell Holmes, she lets her realism smother any glimmers of sentiment outside of what she can safely feel when she is looking at art. Art is her refuge and barrier. Charlotte’s and Brooks’s navigation of the asphyxiating conventions of propriety between rich tourists is the subplot of this somewhat schematic story. They cannot, in late 19th century Italy, freely hang out with each other without raising eyebrows, though reading Casanova or Retif de la Bretonne on the previous century’s sexual mores you’d think the 1960s were mere catch-up to former freedoms. But it’s true: the reactionary 19th century put a lid on libertinism, in the pretentious classes especially. The old man’s weariness allows Brooks to escort Charlotte by themselves to the top of Milan Cathedral and its “immense skyward elevation and a fierce blinding efflorescence of fantastic forms of marble.” (I had not known of the maze of marvels offered by the only Gothic cathedral with allowable passage through its terraces.) The Evanses go to Venice. He goes to Vicenza, not far from Venice, where he buys from a “charming, and yet so mendacious and miserable” family the painting of a Madonna and Child the family claims is an original Correggio. He doesn’t believe it. But the portrait reminds him of Charlotte. The symbolism, paid with a reference to Charlotte ironically saying she is glad she’s no Catholic (not a slight, but from relief that she doesn’t boil with passion), is a bit syrupy. The family wouldn’t have sold the fake Correggio but for the seemingly terminal illness that befalls their young daughter. “Her face haunted me. What fatal wrong had she suffered? What hidden sorrow had blasted the freshness of her youth?” Brooks is not haunted for long and the dying girl is forgotten: it isn’t she Brooks will rescue from sorrows but Charlotte. The story abruptly transitions from his thoughts for the dying girl to this: “As I began to smell the nearing Adriatic, my fancy bounded forward to claim asylum in the calmer presence of my bright American friend.” He finds Charlotte in a church, in a praying pose. They have dinner, they spy a young man at a nearby table, giving James, when he has Charlotte wonder where the man is from, a crack at the obligatory bite of supremacy we occasionally find in his stories: “He is made of that precious clay that is common to the whole English-speaking race,” Brooks says. Charlotte imposes a “three days’ probation” on their time together, which intensifies his longing for her.

 

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