In the April edition of New English Review, our favorite doctor takes a pleasant stroll through his English town’s public gardens and contemplates the lives of those whose names he sees inscribed on park benches.

I myself have been a wanderer rather than rooted and have both admired and envied those who are rooted: though no doubt had I been rooted by family pressure or tradition, I should have kicked against the traces and gone wandering all the same. I wanted both rootedness and freedom from the restrictions and limitations that rootedness entails; in other words I had contradictory and irreconcilable desires.