Watch closely, Richard Quinney reminds himself, participate, experience the mystery. And watching, we experience with him the wonders of the borderland between a remembered past and an ever-unfolding present, the extraordinary mysteries of ordinary life in a world comfortably situated in the middle of a vast, unknowable universe.
To be a midwesterner is, for Quinney, to belong to a place, to a time, to a community, all of which...