When I think about giving thanks, I don’t think about what or whom I’m thanking. The feeling is more a sense of general gratitude, even relief; it’s a reminder to myself to be aware of what’s good—an exercise that has become more poignant in recent days.

Here’s one little ritual I occasionally perform: I go to a local pub, order a pint of lager, and curl up with a short story by the great Irish-English writer William Trevor, who died on Sunday, at 88. One of his volumes of collected stories has 60, the other has 48, so opening one of those books to a new story feels to me a little like life: Eventually I’ll run out of William Trevor stories, but for now the bounty seems sufficient. Of course, the bounty becomes less plentiful with every pint, and so, perhaps, each story becomes more precious. But no matter: This ritual is not about what’s to come. It’s not about what’s been done. It’s not about deadlines or dread or hope or regrets. I write a lot about astronomy and cosmology, so I think about space and time while on the job, and the same is true at the pub of an evening: It’s about here and now.

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Richard Panek

Richard Panek's latest book is The Trouble with Gravity: Solving the Mystery Beneath Our Feet (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). A Guggenheim Fellow in science writing, he is also the author of The 4% Universe: Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and the Race to Discover the Rest of Reality, which received the 2012 Science Communication award from the American Institute of Physics. He was also the co-author, with Temple Grandin, of The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum, a New York Times best-seller and the recipient of the Goodreads Choice Award for Best Nonfiction Book of 2013. He also wrote the National Geographic giant-format movie Robots 3D. His educational and professional background is in both journalism and fiction, disciplines he combines in trying to illuminate the history and philosophy of science even for readers who, like himself before he begins his research, would know little or nothing about the topic at hand.

Latest posts by Richard Panek (see all)

• Error in F Sharp - May 4, 2020
• A Lesson from Doggerel - October 28, 2019
• The Invention of Meaning; the Meaning of Invention - June 17, 2019
• What We Talk About When We Talk About Craft - March 25, 2019
• What’s in a Title - December 10, 2018