The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Sunday, May 17, 2026

Juxtapositions: Surely, if you have read the Steinbeck novel known as Travels with Charley (ostensibly a factual account of Steinbeck’s travels across the United States in the late 1950s, but in fact a novelized account roughly in concert with Aaron Copeland’s method of writing “Appalachian Spring” from his piano bench in Brooklyn), you remember the famous passage about Lonesome Harry, the character Steinbeck invents from the scraps and and specs he finds left behind in a motel room: “As I sat in this unmade room, Lonesome Harry began to take shape and dimension. I could feel that recently departed guest in the bits and pieces of himself he had left behind. Of course Charley, even with his imperfect nose, would have known more. But Charley was in a kennel preparing to be clipped. Even so, Harry is as real to me as anyone I ever met, and more real than many. He is not unique, in fact is a member of a fairly large group. Therefore he becomes of interest in any investigation of America. Before I begin to patch him together, lest a number of men grow nervous, let me declare that his name is not Harry. He lives in Westport, Connecticut. This information comes from the laundry strips from several shirts. A man usually lives where he has his shirts laundered. I only suspect that he commutes to work in New York. His trip to Chicago was primarily a business trip with some traditional pleasures thrown in. I know his name because he signed it a number of times on hotel stationery, each signature with a slightly different slant. This seems to indicate that he is not entirely sure of himself in the business world, but there were other signs of that.” And on it goes. A few days ago in L’envers et l’endroit, the Camus book of essays that could be translated as The Upending, I came across the following description that seemed to tell us, a few decades before Steinbeck met Harry’s remains, when Harry died. Camus was staying in a motel I think in Prague. He was in his early 20s: “In the lobby, the staff were whispering. I quickly went upstairs to find myself more quickly in front of what I was waiting for. That was it. The bedroom door was half open, so that all we could see was a large wall painted blue. But the dull light I spoke of above projected onto this screen the shadow of a dead man lying on the bed and that of a policeman standing guard in front of the body. The two shadows intersected at right angles. This light shocked me. It was authentic, a true light of life, of afternoons of life, a light that makes us realize that we are living. He was dead. Alone in his room. I knew it wasn’t suicide. I rushed back to my room and threw myself on my bed. A man like many others, short and fat if I believed the shadow. He had probably died a long time ago. And life continued in the hotel, until the boy had the idea of ​​calling him. He had arrived there without suspecting anything and he had died alone. Meanwhile, I was reading the advertisement for my shaving paste. I spent the entire afternoon in a state that I could hardly describe. I lay there, my head empty and my heart strangely tight. I was doing my nails. I counted the grooves in the parquet floor. “If I can count to a thousand… ” At fifty or sixty, it was a debacle. I couldn’t go any further. I couldn’t hear any noises from outside. Once, however, in the corridor, a muffled voice, a woman’s voice said in German: “He was so good.” Then I thought desperately of my city, on the shores of the Mediterranean…” And how often do we, dear readers, find ourselves on the rim of the same abyss, desperately thinking of our city on the shores of the Mediterranean?

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It almost always happens during a trip that on a certain morning or a certain evening you ask yourself with bewilderment: but what am I doing here? The time has come; I open my eyes, I find myself sitting in a leather armchair in the middle of a hotel lobby and I think: of all the places in the world, why did I end up in Rochester?

–From Simone de Beauvoir’s America Day By Day (1953).

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