Mirkwood

John Updike has a moving short story titled My Father’s Tears in February’s New Yorker. Here is how it begins:

Come to think of it, I saw my father cry only once. It was at the Alton train station, back when the trains still ran. I was on my way to Philadelphia to catch the train that would return me to Boston and college. I was eager to go, for already my home and my parents had become somewhat unreal to me, and college, with its courses and the hopes for my future they inspired and the girlfriend I had acquired in my sophomore year, had become more real every semester; it shocked me—threw me off track, as it were—to see that my father’s eyes, as he shook my hand goodbye, glittered with tears.

Elsewhere in the same issue, John Lanchester writes in a review piece called Pursuing Happiness:

Risk-taking Ig and worried Og both would have regarded our easy, long, riskless lives with incredulous envy. They would have regarded us as so lucky that questions about our state of mind wouldn’t be worth asking. It is a perverse consequence of our fortunate condition that the question of our happiness, or lack of it, presses unhappily hard on us.

I am half-way through Menno Schilthuizen's Frogs, Flies, and Dandelions, a funny and engrossing little book about speciation. Among the many gems, this, at the very beginning:

[After describing a very weird mammal] It might seem odd that these remarkable animals never figure in Sunday-evening wildlife documentaries on television. There are good reasons why they don't. First of all, the Hi-Iay islands are remote, inaccessible, and the Rhinogradentia elusive. Another complicating factor is the complete annihilation of the islands, the Darwin Institute there, and the World Congress of Rhinogradologists by a nuclear disaster in the 1950s. And then, of course, there is the fact that they never existed in the first place. - From the Prologue.