There's nothing especially unusual in the enterprise of taking stock of one's life. As the late Barry Lopez wrote in Horizons, his exquisite 2019 memoir, "We, all of us, look back over our lives, trying to make sense of what happened, to see what enduring threads might be there." For my part, I am not sure how many coherent threads I have found, or if things make any more sense to me than they did when I began the writing. For...