Writing in The American Conservative, Dalrymple begins with a sleepless night and a maddening itch on his back and arrives, by characteristic indirection, at a meditation on complaint, gratitude, and human nature. Along the way he offers an appreciative tribute to the unsung ingenuity behind that humblest of instruments, the backscratcher.
We should bear gratitude in mind more often. We won’t, though: that is my complaint against human nature.