But what does that mean? What should that mean? I don’t want rules because if I make rules, I’ll break rules, and when I break rules I feel guilt, which causes the very sort of anxiety I want a Sabbath to help me keep under wraps. Yet there has to be something that makes the day different than every other one.

A work-in-progress list:

• No Internet
• No cell phone
• No clock-watching
• Act deliberately
• Read widely and slowly
• Spend time with family and friends

And about that whole big meal thing … when do we eat?

Yellow. Blue. Pink. Sky layered and light. Soft breeze — just enough to make a pot of flowers slowly dance. Two kids in the park across the street squeeze in the day’s last laughs. Final call for bird chirps. A small animal — was that a gopher? — scurries from tree to bush. My eyes are tired. Possibly because they have spent too much time today looking at the wrong things.

From “Once More to the Lake”:

“Summertime, oh, summertime, pattern of life indelible, the fade-proof lake, the woods unshatterable, the pasture with the sweetfern and the juniper forever and ever, summer without end; this was the background, and the life along the shore was the design, the cottagers with their innocent and tranquil design, their tiny docks with the flagpole and the American flag floating against the white clouds in the blue sky, the little paths leading back to the outhouses and the can of lime for sprinkling, and the souvenir counters at the store, the miniature birchbark canoes and the postcards that showed things looking a little better than they looked.”

I re-read this essay — on a warm afternoon that, I later learned, happened to be E.B. White’s birthday — and, a couple of days later, I am still thinking about it, even when I’m not. (I tend to have low enthusiasm for re-reading but, really, there is no such thing. The text is different because I am different.) I had remembered the classic clincher (read it and weep) but I did not remember (and, more likely, I did not before have it in me to fully ascertain) how vividly and elegantly White conjures what I call (for lack of a more artful term) a pure life moment. That sense that childhood has returned but is colored by experience; that memory and reality have merged and somehow stitched together the years; that I have stumbled into a corner of my mind where the sun always shines, even when it’s raining; and love — not romantic love or parental love but rather a different sort of love, the love of the cosmos, perhaps (I can’t say that I know) — removes every trifling thought.

Frederick Kaufman’s essay in the July issue of Harper’s (subscription) — which I recommend to anyone who eats — speaks of another universal need: food. His point is not that the government should run our grocery stores and, to be sure, that is not my position, either. Yet it seems clear that treating our cereal boxes the same way we treat our iPads is no longer working. Not everyone needs the latest app. But everyone must eat.

The article explains why our grain-laden grocery bills have risen so drastically in recent years — the worldwide price of food rose by 80 percent between 2005 and 2008, Kaufman says — and the harm that hike has had on countless people. Some 49 million Americans suddenly found themselves “unable to put a full meal on the table” and “demand for food stamps reached and all-time high.” One in five American kids came to “depend on food kitchens.”

Incredibly, it gets worse:

“The global speculative frenzy sparked riots in more than thirty countries and drove the number of the world’s ‘food insecure’ to more than a billion. In 2008, for the first time since such statistics have been kept, the proportion of the world’s population without enough to eat ratcheted upward. The ranks of the hungry had increased by 250 million in a single year, the most abysmal increase in all of human history.”

The article underscores how important it is to me to support corporate agribusiness — makers of nearly every product in traditional grocery stores — as little as possible. Fortunately, I live in a community in which another option exists. Fortunately, I shop at a place in which a watermelon is not an edible widget.

On Saturday morning, after we went to the fantastic Riverwalk Market Fair, we stopped by Just Food to buy goodies for our Fourth of July grill. From the parking lot (where I passed an advertisement for the “competition” we just left) … to the aisles of food made from ingredients I can actually pronounce … to the employee who offered to bag my groceries (the next time I receive less-than-stellar customer service at the co-op will be the first time) … to the closed-on-the-holiday sign (not surprising that good people work where they aren’t treated like numbers on corporate-office spreadsheets) … I was reminded that, at least at this one food shop, the bottom line is about more than money.

Maybe this is pure coincidence, but customers at the co-op always seem happy. Or maybe I am projecting that sense because  even though I hate shopping for anything nearly everywhere I always feel good at the co-op. That good feeling is one reason why I willingly spend more there than I would at nearby on-the-grid grocers. (I confess that I use those nearby options periodically because I am not in a financial position to fully disregard them — but I do so as infrequently as possible.) I also buy as much as I can at Just Food because I do not have to worry about my choices. They are healthier (no partially hydrogenated oils), tastier (pesticides do not taste very good), and directly support the economy of the place I call home. I do not know many members of staff and yet I trust them because I know they supply the store with more than profits in mind.

A company’s job is to make money. I get it. I would not have the Mac laptop I am using to type this post if Steve Jobs had not had a financial incentive to make it. He is supremely rich and that is OK by me. However, when I buy a product that is necessary for my health and nourishment, I do not want the very idea of health and nourishment obscured by profits and stock prices.

The libertarian reply — that the market will respond to my demand — is not only lacking, something close to the opposite dynamic has taken hold. Kaufman articulates causes for the recent food bubble. He also asks whether it could happen again. Could prices rise even higher?

“Yes,” says Layne Carlson of the Minneapolis Grain Exchange. In fact, it is a near certainty. That is because of what Carlson calls the two principles governing the grain markets: “fear and greed.”

“There are transformative events, but not many; and the frequent insistence upon unprecedentedness of one’s own time is evidence only of excitability. There is no need of breaking news for the purposes of arriving at one’s fundamental beliefs. The study of history should suffice. It is a better guide for moral and political understanding than experience, which is commonly a narrowing influence, and certainly for those of us who enjoy the West’s insulation from almost every enormity: when we are schooled only by our experience, we become trivial.”

So often these days, commentary pertains to how X (the Internet, social media, Google, the new health-care law, Sarah Palin’s glasses — take your pick) has changed, or will change, the world forever. Of course, in some cases the angle might prove prescient. Yet it is curious to me how frequently we take a single present-day phenomenon and imbue it with  meaning that comes across as if manufactured in the same plant as the latest iPhone.

Take e-readers. For many years, the prevailing view has been that e-readers will one day take over the book market. Of course, that might be the case. And, in fact, at this point that one day might not be far off. But, if/when that happens, will we know whether such a result has come about for reasons of taste and usefulness? Or will it simply be the product of a drumbeat — the “inevitable” angle was published in book reviews and business pages for so long, even when e-book sales were less than three percent of the market, that you would think your “Angels & Demons” paperback had become a relic — making it so? I wonder.

That might not be the best example. You do not have to look far to find others. (And my point, to the extend I have one, isn’t just about gadgets. Our election cycles, for one, almost never seem to end.) Heck, this month the Atlantic even contemplates the obsolescence of men. Maybe this is nothing more than a reflection of my experience, but it seems we are increasingly, almost perpetually, looking for the next trend, the next big thing, the next seismic shift. Perhaps because we are more aware of the change that exists (change being the only constant), we want the balls to fall out of the air already. We want to know the way things will be so we can bring order back into our lives. Or maybe we just like getting new stuff. Maybe we are easily bored. I don’t know. But we do seem obsessed with how much what we are doing rightnow will alter life ten years from now or a hundred. As if our time, more than any other, will change everything.

Am I onto something that resembles a point here? Are we? Or are we obscured by our own arrogance?

Either way, how will our present view of the future, fashion that future?

“I came as close to actually fainting as I think I ever have, because I literally just could not believe what I saw when it came up on the website,” Harding told NPR. “And I kept refreshing and it just kept coming up Tinkers, Tinkers, Tinkers.”

“Tinkers,” “Tinkers,” “Tinkers.” I had a woman ask me the other day what she should read while on vacation. That was my answer.

Not only do I recommend the novel on its merits (more on that below), I also like telling people the story behind the book. It’s almost as good.

After he finished writing it, Harding sent “Tinkers” to dozens of agents and publishers. No takers. So he stuck it in a drawer and decided to move on. Then, suddenly, he got a single nibble: The Bellevue Literary Press. Bellevue — that venerable publishing powerhouse under the auspices of the New York University School of Medicine. Yes, that Bellevue. The mental hospital.

The first print run was, of course, small. However, so many newspaper reviewers and independent booksellers — those dinosaurs, who needs ‘em? — got behind the book that, eventually, the Pulitzer committee asked the publisher to submit “Tinkers” for consideration. (As the story supposedly goes, the committee had already reviewed all of the most likely suspects and was not satisfied.) In winning, “Tinkers” became the first novel from a small house to win since 1981 (Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole, Louisiana University Press). “When I step back a little bit,” Harding says, “[I] just think this is just one of these really, really cool, wonderful literary anecdotes. But then what’s mind-blowing to me is that I happen to be the protagonist.”

“Tinkers” itself is the story of the final hours of a man, George Washington Crosby, and his relationship with his epileptic father. But jacket summary copy doesn’t apply here. “Tinkers” is also about that which is experienced and not told — the power of words to illuminate the human condition. “It confers on the reader the best privilege fiction can afford, the illusion of ghostly proximity to other human souls,” says fellow Pulitzer Prize winner Marilynne Robinson (on, of all places, the book’s back cover).

It’s fitting that Robinson was an early endorser, because while reading “Tinkers,” I was more than once reminded of her first novel, Housekeeping. Harding shares Robinson’s gift for stringing beautiful sentences together with delicate care. (For the record, I had a richer experience reading “Tinkers.”) A sample:

“A wind would come up through the trees, sounding like a chorus, so like a breath then, so sounding like a breath, the breath of thousands of souls gathering itself up somewhere in the timber lining the bowls and depressions behind the worn mountains the way thunderstorms did and crawling up their backs the way the thunderstorms did, too, which you couldn’t hear, quite, but felt barometrically — a contraction or flattening as of tone as everything compressed in front of it, again, which you couldn’t see, quite, but instead could almost see the result of — water flattening, so the light coming off of it shifted angles, the grass stiffening, so it went from green to silver, the swallows flitting over the pond all being pushed forward and then falling back to their original positions as they corrected for the change, as if the wind were sending something in front of it.”

I plan to read “Tinkers” twice. The first time through, I took in the story. A second reading will be to allow the words to fill me up.

Through the first two chapters of Little Bee, author Chris Cleave had me under such a spell. The novel, which tells the story of two strangers, a British woman and a Nigerian girl, who become improbably and inextricably linked in each other’s lives after meeting on a beach and witnessing a horror that defies short summary, quickly sucked me in. Most often with lyrical lines of sensory detail. “So I am a refugee, and I get very lonely,” Little Bee, the title character, says. “Is it my fault if I do not look like an English girl and I do not talk like a Nigerian? Well, who says and English girl must have skin as pale as a the clouds that float across her summers?” And concise play-by-play, a quality first-person narration demands, made me want to know more about the speaker. “She was whispering into it in some language that sounded like butterflies drowning in honey.” At the end of the first chapter, too, the reader encounters lovely symbolism as Little Bee discards a strap around her identity.

The story, told from a dual point of view, alternates chapters of Little Bee in first, then the London woman, Sarah, also in first. The second chapter, Sarah’s first as speaker, was the most moving in the book. Cleave cinematically conveys images that linger: the widow, an under-dressed Little Bee, and Sarah’s young son, who wears a Batman costume for every occasion, walk to the funeral as Sarah provides haunting description of her interior landscape. “Whenever I need to stop and remind myself how much I once loved Andrew,” she says, “I only need to think about this. That the ocean covers seven-tenths of the earth’s surface, and yet my husband could make me not notice it. That is how big he was for me.” She continues the lament a few pages later. “How to explain death to a four-year-old superhero? … I am a very ordinary woman, I think, and I am quite well equipped to deal with everyday evil. Interrupted sex, tough editorial decisions and malfunctioning coffee machines — these my mind could readily accept. But my Andrew, dead? It still seemed physically impossible. At one point he had covered more than seven-tenths of the earth’s surface.” At the end of the chapter (spoiler alert), after Batman realizes his father is in the coffin, he dives on top of it in order to save him. “Daddy, Daddy, get OUT!” he calls, bringing me closer to tears than any scene I have read in recent memory.

But The Dream fractures, and suddenly — as dreams often do. (This usually happens at our house when a certain dog registers that the potentially menacing morning newspaper has landed on the front porch). And, at least in my case, such a startle makes me cranky. Rather than an organic story, “Little Bee” comes off as contrived, and once I began noticing its contrivance, the clues were nearly all that my subconscious looked for. First, it was how long Cleave drew out the beach incident (dangling it on the line for 80-plus pages) and then, in the fifth chapter, Little Bee’s direct address, to “you,” began to feel less like a narrative device and more as a trick. This is when my radar flipped on, but these were hardly the strongest signals that radar would find. In the fifth chapter, L.B. (as I like to call her) repackages Sarah’s cover-the-world line, which rang as though said in a tin room. While reading, I almost never think “I know what’s going to happen next,” but suddenly I did that without trying. And about small interactions, not big-picture stuff.

The Dream was officially and unalterably interrupted slightly more than half way through the book when Sarah — a character of few redeeming qualities — gets frustrated that mourning her husband might take a year or longer (by my count, at this point he’s been in the ground less than 24 hours). She seems more bothered by this fact than she is that Andrew is gone (she did, in fact, have a lover on the side; at one point she tells L.B. she doesn’t know where she would be without Lawrence — and says this without being aware of the irony that sans Lawrence, Andrew would still be alive). Just then L.B., who showed up at Sarah’s on the day of the funeral, interjects: “I will help you. If you want me to stay then this is how it will be between us. Maybe I will only be able to stay for one month, maybe only one week. Someday, the men will come. But while I am here, I will be like your daughter. I will love you as if you were my mother and I will love Charlie as if he were my brother.” WTF? A page later, Sarah responds: ” … Maybe these are serious times.” Maybe? Or maybe you are not looking at the light side of suicide!

Yes, at this point, I became the story’s most realistic antagonist — versus actual ones, including Sarah’s increasingly unlikable and paranoid lover, and African authorities who apparently take L.B., an innocent 16-year-old girl, for a criminal mastermind — and I began filling notebook pages with snarky remarks that I will mercifully leave out of this review.

Hey, it might well be me. Nearly up and down the line, the reviews are glowing and “Little Bee” is a mainstay on bestseller lists. Apparently, most readers are not jilted from The Dream as I was — and it’s not difficult to see why others are attracted to the story. There are unique characters, a multi-cultural backdrop involving under-reported injustice, and the author has a gift for dual point of view. The rendering, at least, never felt jarring.

But the contrivance did more than annoy moody me. It prevented me from experiencing the story’s emotional content. Near the end, L.B. tells “you” — the identity of whom we neither learn nor can plausibly surmise — that her life, which has been essentially spoiled by forces not of her making, has not been wasted.

“I smiled down at Charlie, and I understood that he would be free now even if I would not. In this way, the life that was in me would find its home in him now. It was not a sad feeling. I felt my heart take off lightly like a butterfly and I thought, yes, this is it, something has survived in me, something that does not need to run anymore, because it is worth more than all the money in the world and its currency, its true home, is the living. And not just the living in this particular country or in that particular country, but the secret, irresistible heart of the living. I smiled back at Charlie and I knew that the hopes of this whole human world could fit inside one soul. This is a good trick. This is called globalization.”

If that grabs you, pick up “Little Bee.” Those lines made me feel like I had swallowed an extra cup of coffee — and I do not even drink coffee.