The question usually shows up before the coffee is gone. Where did that come from?
It’s a small thing, a splinter of curiosity that works its way up from nowhere, and it must happen to everybody. There was a time when a question like that died right there in bed. Answering it meant a library, a reference desk, an afternoon. Now it means four seconds and a thumb.
This morning the splinter was barbed wire.
I got there sideways. My daily Readwise highlights had loosened something, and what floated up was After Barbed Wire, a book of cowboy photography I found years ago at an antiquarian bookseller in San Francisco. It’s a big book with few words and a great many monochrome pictures of men and horses and the empty West.