I write to you today, dear readers, from my own home, at my own desk, rather than my customary desk in the back of the library and have been pursuing a practiced leisure that usually evades me during the academic year. Summer is a time that allows for both a renewal and reexamination of our customary practices.

With all the regularity of ritual, I have locked away my thinnest sweaters and hung up the seersucker, silk, and madras garments that constitute any respectable summer wardrobe. Once we have enrobed our bodies with the fabrics of the season, we take them forth into the warm woods, a movement as instinctual as that of the birds above us. I have felt this urge much more strongly than in years past, when a new translation would be enough to deride any attempts to exterior seasonality, and I have been enjoying this change of praxis. The breakdown of our assumptions and habits is a necessity for polite living.

Etiquette is comprised, in a broad sense, of awareness of one’s praxis and a strong understanding of the ‘prerogative to promise.’ This column has focused on the latter for most of its duration and discussed the pertinent passage in much exalted detail. I advise that you take this time, dear reader to not just ‘question your assumptions’ or some such bourgeois soul-searching juice cleanse of validation, but, acknowledging that the barrier between esthetic praxis and mundane praxis is pure artifice, to consciously reexamine the minute actions of our most repeated bodily (inter)actions.

On a separate and closing note, I am elated beyond measure to confirm the existence of, and my presence for, the second gathering of the staff of this magazine in the home of Poe and Post and look strongly forward to that date. Your attendance and the beautiful transformation from readers to listeners is a most welcome one.

Robert Hayes Kee

May 30^th

Atlanta, GA