This weekend, I plan to attend the new, mammoth Edward Hopper exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. I’ll be going with friends—which may not be entirely apt, given the common image of Hopper as American painting’s poet laureate of loneliness. To me, the image seems accurate enough: Hopper imparts mystery and even a sense of chic to the fact of human isolation, splashing it with sunlight here, shrouding it in urban darkness there, but in any event framing its austere truth against a background of lavish color. His compositions, dramatic or even cinematic in form, lend focused dignity to figures who would otherwise fade into a bleached (or blackened) oblivion.

But Peter Schjedahl, reviewing the show in the New Yorker, dismisses that standard gloss on Hopper.

His preoccupied people will neither confirm nor deny any fantasy they stir; their intensity of being defeats conjecture. Imputations, to them, of “loneliness” are sentimental projections by viewers who ought to look harder. They may not have lives you envy, but they live them without complaint.

Sentimental or not, the intimation of solitude is something that I’ll no doubt carry with me as I trudge through the show—and through a crowd of duly appointed fellow art lovers. (The MFA, somewhat like a doctor’s office, is scheduling visitors in half-hour intervals.)

For a while now, the editors of the New York Times Magazine have been contracting well-known fiction masters to write serialized works whose carefully doled-out segments, presumably, will give readers a spot of relief from reports on Darfur and advertisements for lingerie. This past Sunday, the magazine published the first chapter of an art-heist caper by Ian Rankin. The tale (a stand-alone novel, not an entry in the John Rebus series) will unfold over the next three months, and Rankin will then adapt it for book publication in 2008.

Like a lot of people, I like the idea of publishing a novel in serial form. The image of a Dickens or a Wilkie Collins sweating out chapters of his latest potboiler, scrambling to end each installment on a properly suspenseful note, and handing ink-still-wet pages to an impatient typesetter has time-honored appeal. It corresponds to our romantic view of the novelist as part wandering troubadour (spinning an endless yarn and stringing along a willing audience, Scheherazade-like) and part industrial craftsman (making piece goods for a booming mass market). The idea of serialized publication also plays to the assumption that suspense is the cardinal feature of storytelling—that waiting isn’t the hardest part, it’s the best part.

The reality, however, is that waiting a week or more between stints of reading a novel is pointless. The practice of distributing long works of fiction through periodical literature has fallen into disuse, and for very good reason. When you can buy any of thousands upon thousands of novels in paperback, each for less than a ten-spot, when you can then read such a book at your own sweet pace and without interruption, why would you turn to a magazine to sate your narrative needs?

(With TV shows, by the way, it used to be that you had no choice but to “tune in next week” if you wanted to follow a sequence of episodes through to its finish. Now, thanks to the DVD revolution, you can watch an entire season of The Sopranos or Lost over the course of several evenings, much as you might march through a novel in nightly reading sessions. I’ve reached a point where the idea of watching a show when it’s first broadcast—and waiting seven days for the story to resume—has become unthinkable.)

I read the first chapter of “Doors Open,” the new Rankin serial, and it’s a decent work of stage-setting that leaves me with no inclination to buy or log on to the Times Magazine next week. Rankin writes in a stock manner (he gives one character “dark piercing eyes”), and his plotting moves along rails that many a screenwriter has greased before him. The magazine includes the serial in its Funny Pages section, so “caveat lector” applies to those who come looking for deathless prose or matchless storytelling. I just wonder: Who does come looking for a phoned-in, chopped-up narrative of this kind, and why?

A work of narrative art, as I noted previously, needs to exist as a self-contained, fully realized whole. Serial publication doesn’t prevent a novel from attaining that exalted state, once all of its parts have made their appearance. But this format does seem to compromise a work—by altering its natural flow, by converting it into a vehicle of audience-grabbing entertainment. (“What will happen next to our hero . . . ?”) Audience grabbing and entertainment are all right in their place, but novelists and novel readers also have other business to attend to.

Back in 1996, Stephen King published The Green Mile in six parts than hit bookstores at the rate of one trim volume per month. I was then working at a bookshop, and I recall the modest flurry of excitement that attended each new installment of King’s Depression-era tale. (There was something apt, I suppose, in his choosing that period for a story that followed the structure of a Saturday-afternoon movie serial.) Readers cleared out our stock of each title, month after month, and King cleaned up financially by bringing out The Green Mile twice—first in that series of little chapbooks and then in a one-volume edition. Still, however lucrative it may have been, this gimmick is not one that King has repeated.

This week, in its “Innovators Issue,” the New Yorker reviews a book whose gist is that innovation isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be. The true power of a technology, argues David Edgerton, author of The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900, often emerges from the way people use it over a period that extends well past the “Eureka!” moment that spawned it. In his review, though, Steven Shapin emphasizes a deeper point about the products of our tool-wielding species: No less important than the creation of a piece of technology, or even its adaptation, is the work of maintaining it. That truth, chronically neglected, applies as well to our built environment.

One aspect of India that struck me with special force during my trip there early this year was the seeming lack of interest among Indians in the upkeep and repair of their existing physical infrastructure. New development and technological progress abound, but everything that isn’t new deteriorates. In Mumbai and Delhi, skyscrapers gleam overhead while sidewalks crumble underfoot. As Suketu Mehta writes in his book Maximum City, the nation now produces software engineers by the millions, yet home-owners go begging for a reasonably competent electrician.

What caught my notice during a trip to London in 2003, by contrast, was how sprightly and new that ancient city looked. I’d last seen the place in the 1980s, and in the interim the legions of Cool Britannia had tightened its screws, trimmed its ragged edges, swept away the sawdust, and given it a fresh coat of paint. There were shiny new structures, to be sure, but they impressed me far less than did the spit-polished appearance of neighborhoods that were once soot-gray, according to my Thatcher-era memories.

It’s a large subject—the care and feeding of a civilization and its artifacts—and I’ve idly thought that someone needs to write a book on it (to be titled “In Good Repair,” or some such). I won’t write it, but in any event here are a few notes toward such a work, from Shapin’s review essay.

Our obsession with innovation also blinds us to how much of technology is focussed on keeping things the same. The dikes of Holland maintain the integrity of the nation, and great ingenuity goes into preserving and improving them. We’re going to need a lot more, and more powerful, technologies of conservation: not just the technologies of levees and barriers against the ocean but technologies to maintain the supply of potable water, breathable air, and arable soil; technologies to maintain as much biodiversity as we can or want to maintain; technologies to preserve and renew our crumbling Victorian legacies of infrastructure (sewers, rail beds, roads, and bridges); technologies to stabilize and prevent the dispersal of radioactive waste. There may be hype attending new technological artifacts, but there’s money to be made, and spent, in maintaining them in usable shape. According to Edgerton, the take-home price of a P.C. is typically only about ten per cent of its lifetime cost, and sixty per cent of the lifetime cost of some military equipment is maintenance. The federal government spends twice as much on preserving highways as it does on building new ones. . . .

The importance of maintenance becomes even clearer if we take a global view. Edgerton notes that as things get older they tend to move from rich countries to poor ones, from low-maintenance to high-maintenance environments. In many African, South Asian, and Latin-American countries, used vehicles imported from North America, Western Europe, and Japan live on almost eternally, in constant contact with numerous repair shops. Maintenance doesn’t simply mean keeping those vehicles as they were; it may mean changing them in all sorts of ways—new gaskets made from old rubber, new fuses made from scrap copper wire. . . . Much of the world’s mechanical ingenuity is devoted to creating robust, reliable, and highly adapted “creole” technologies, an ingenuity that is largely invisible to us only because we happen to live in a low-maintenance, high-throwaway regime.

Maintenance has implications for the identity of technological artifacts. There’s a traditional conundrum about “my grandfather’s axe”: over its lifetime, it has had three new heads and four new handles, but—its owner insists—it remains his grandfather’s axe. Philosophers have their proprietary version of the axe problem: “Locke’s socks” developed a hole, which he had darned, and then darned again. The socks kept the philosopher’s feet warm, but they troubled his head. Many people make their living repairing things; a very few make their living pondering whether repaired things are the same. . . .

That (“All Things Must End”) was the tagline for the final season of the HBO series Six Feet Under. Used in that context, the old saw cut brilliantly in two directions: In its fifth season, the show itself was coming to an end; and the show, throughout its run, treated death as its core theme. A family drama in which the family home doubled as a funeral home, it began each of its episodes by introducing viewers to a character—and then killing the character off before the opening titles rolled.

Human lives come to a stop, eventually, and so do mere TV shows. That the producers of Six Feet Under knew its endpoint—and could plan its concluding sequence of episodes on their own terms—was vital element of the show’s ultimate artistic success. The series finale, in which flash-forwarded scenes reveal what happens to every member of the Fisher clan before they reach their expiration date, won an immediate spot in the episodic-television Hall of Fame. It offered “closure” on a grand scale, and gave the whole series a certain novelistic solidity. The creators of other standout TV series have not been so wise, or so lucky.

Yesterday, the New York Times reported that the producers of Lost (a show that I’ve never watched, although a smart friend has strongly recommended that I give it a look) will terminate the series three seasons from now. They have wisdom on their side, apparently, along with the good fortune of retaining some leverage with their network gatekeepers.

ABC announced on Monday that it would broadcast three more seasons of its hit castaway mystery, “Lost,” ending the show in 2010 after a run of six seasons.

The announcement has been expected since January, when the creators of the show told a group of television writers that they wanted the network to set a definitive end date for the series.

Such a date was necessary, they said, so that they could begin planning how to unravel the multiple mysteries that beset the fictional survivors of Oceanic Air Flight 815, which crashed on an uncharted island en route from Sydney, Australia, to Los Angeles in September 2004.

But the move by ABC is nevertheless unusual because networks usually try to milk profits from their successful series as long as possible, a strategy that often results in convoluted story lines, shake-ups among production staff and dwindling fan bases.

That is exactly the situation that Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse, two of the show’s executive producers, said early this year that they wanted to avoid. When they announced their desire to set a specific end date to the series at a January meeting of the Television Critics Association in Pasadena, Calif., they surprised even the ABC executives who were attending.

“We have always envisioned ‘Lost’ as a show with a beginning, middle and end,” Mr. Lindelof and Mr. Cuse said in a statement, which was released over the weekend to The Hollywood Reporter and to the rest of the news media on Monday. “By officially announcing exactly when that ending will be, the audience will now have the security of knowing that the story will play out as we’ve intended.”

In other words, if the the Lost crew are going to “jump the shark” in the choppy waters near their uncharted island, they’ll be doing it on their own schedule.

Too often, good shows plug along well past the completion in their natural story arc, or else they have the plug pulled on them while that arc is still under construction. Twin Peaks, the early 1990s series that foreshadowed our current golden age of episodic TV, remains the classic example of a show that outlasted its reason for being. By early in the second season, we knew who had killed Laura Palmer (or did we?), and yet Special Agent Dale Cooper kept doggedly at his business, week after week. David Lynch, the show’s creator, had the small-screen equivalent of a Victorian double-decker gothic novel on his hands, but he let it become a shapeless shaggy-dog story. Leap ahead to our own time, and you’ll hear complaints that The Sopranos—now in its final season—may have gone past its proper life span.

Two of my favorite HBO series, Deadwood and Carnivale, suffered the opposite problem of seeing their narrative lives cut short before their time. David Milch, the writer-producer of Deadwood, had a four-season story arc in mind for the show; HBO told him that it would pay for three seasons only. Carnivale stops after two seasons, at a cliffhanger that its creators clearly meant to split the show’s epic saga in two—but HBO had no money to keep the story going. (The immense cost of producing another series, Rome, reportedly drained the network’s coffers.)

Executive decisions of that kind validate the idea that a TV show can never be a work of art; it can only be “product,” to be made and sold according to demand. For a defining attribute of any artwork is that it ends. Only by ending can it become a self-contained whole, and only in that way can it attain the cohesive shape—and the sense of creative intentionality—that art exists in large measure to provide.

A work of art must end not only because the exigencies of storytelling (or of space, in visual art) entail a practical respect for boundaries, but also because all art concerns itself fundamentally with death—with finality. All things do pass, particularly things that we care about (starting, perhaps, with our own dear existence), and a principal goal of art is to reconcile us to that melancholy fact. Artists can pursue that goal overtly or implicitly, wittingly or unwittingly. But if they don’t pursue it at all, if let their work go on and on, they’re cheating.

The term “closure” bears the taint of daffy psychobabble. Which is too bad, since it’s as good a word as any for an indispensable concept. In fact, the problem with the word may be that it belongs in the field not of psychology but of aesthetics. In actual life—the life of our thoughts and emotions—we never truly experience closure. There’s forgetting, there’s sublimation, there’s “moving on.” But while we move on, our trials and traumas really don’t; they stay with us, and they don’t reach “closing time” until we do. Art, meanwhile, gives us precisely the sort of closure that our minds cannot.

(Over at the Atlantic Monthly site, two blogging whippersnappers have posted entries on the same Times article. Their comments match my own, more ponderous musings.)

Why do I sign the entries in this log as “The Obelist”? For that matter, what is an “obelist”? Taking the latter question first, I note that the word appears in no standard dictionary. Not at Dictionary.com. Not Merriam-Webster Online. Not in the Webster’s Deluxe Unabridged Dictionary, Second Edition, that squats on a shelf in my living room. In a Google search of “obelist,” the only helpful pages that turn up are those that associate the term with a trio of obscure detective stories from the 1930s. Obelists Fly High, Obelists En Route, and Obelists at Sea, by C. Daly King, define “obelist” in more ways than one, according to online sources. The chief meaning: “one who harbours suspicions.” It’s worth noting that King, in each of his highly puzzle-oriented tales, included a special index called a “clue finder,” where readers could discover the pages on which he had hidden signs and portents of a solution to that book’s mystery. An obelist, therefore, is the sort of reader who scours a murder story for “suspicious,” secret-laden passages.

One online commentator suggests that “obelist” is cognate with “obelus,” a favorite word of mine—or, more to the point, the word for a favorite symbol of mine. The obelus symbol, also called a “dagger” (the word has the same derivation as “obelisk”), is the cross-like glyph (†) that appears in old forms of printing. It, too, has multiple meanings and uses, and among them is the “mark of suspicion” that scholars of yore would insert in a dubious or corrupt bit of text. In early-modern times, the obelus became a mark used to flag a footnote; it served as an understudy of sorts to the asterisk. That usage has become rare in our own period. In another usage, also rare today, an obelus becomes the mark of death, employed by typesetters to signal the year that someone passed away. (An asterisk would signal the year of birth.)

So an obelist, perhaps wielding an obelus as a tool of his trade, is one who notes details with a keen, suspicious eye. In other words, he’s a critic. (An obelist of course can also be a “she,” but in the case of this web log he is not.) An obelist also takes particular interest in things of the past and in things that passeth away—in history and in mystery. And that’s pretty much me.

More generally, I choose to call myself “The Obelist” because I want an alias behind which I can hide, and I like the sound of that one. Thus, while I hope that what I write here has some little merit, I see a trace of significance in another meaning of the term that C. Daly King reportedly offered in his books: “a person who has little or no value.”

Three standard ingredients at a wedding reception are dancing, photography, and alcohol. To succeed, a wedding reception should include no more than two of those ingredients. And one of the included ingredients must be alcohol.

I formulated that nostrum this past weekend at a Marriott Resort hotel in the exurban wasteland north of Chicago, where I attended the wedding and wedding reception of a family friend of my wife. The wedding was an unpretentious and perfectly touching affair. The groom, and the ceremony, were Jewish. The bride, and the apparel of both bride and groom (all the way down to his pointed-toe slippers), were Indian Muslim. Neither the Jewish nor the Muslim tradition has allowed its people to rely much on alcohol as a social lubricant, and this couple’s reception—300 stiffly attired attendees in a large, brightly lit tent, of whom the only people I knew were about a dozen of my in-laws—was therefore lamentably dry.

If managers of the Marriott Resort were counting on a big booze tab to help them make their numbers that weekend, then they were in for a world of financial hurt. That Saturday, the only other event being held at the hotel was a gathering of Christian Broadcasting Network “partners.” Jews and Muslims and Christians, oh my! And all of them, along with assorted beer-swilling secular types, had convened under the same suburban roof. This is a great country.

On trips to and from the hotel bar, I eyed those CBN partners as they shuffled about in little prayer groups. Their average age was about 61; their average pigment was lily-white. The highlight of their evening, according to a program that I peeked at, was to be an after-dinner speech by Pat Robertson. The Pat Robertson. All night, I remained on the lookout for the old goat, hoping that his appearance would make the day’s disharmonic convergence complete, but I never saw him and no high jinks ensued, alas.

I did savor a small irony, though (and a small irony goes down almost as smoothly as a pint of lager). The CBN organizers called their event “Reclaiming the Covenant,” presumably in reference to the pact between the Saviour and the saved. Meanwhile, around the corner from the ballroom where Robertson would later come to bless the reclamation work of CBN, a man and a women entered a different sort of covenant. Nor was the couple’s pact merely metaphorical, since in the Jewish tradition the partners to a marriage typically draft and sign an actual contract. It’s called a Katubah. That afternoon, I watched as alternately the bride and the groom read from their Katubah—shortly before the groom picked up his slippered foot and smashed a ceremonial wine glass.

The photo used in the header to this Web log, at least in the form in which I launch the site today—a scene of the Golden Gate Bridge as captured from the Marin Headlands, with the towers of San Francisco inscribing a dim palimpsest behind the inevitable fog of the Bay—is a visual cliché. Too bad, I like it. I took the photograph in the fall of 2000, during my maiden trip to California. On a crisp September morning, a big blue bus deposited me and perhaps three dozen other tourists at a “scenic overlook” for a brief stop before proceeding to the packaged destinations of Sausalito and the Muir Woods. As directed, we put down our backpacks, drew out our cameras, and snapped perhaps three dozen time-stamped variations of this timeless image.

There is discovery, and then there is recognition. Just because others have already gleaned and trapped an instance of beauty doesn’t mean that it isn’t still beautiful. I and my fellow tourist-bus sheep knew a good thing when we saw it (or we did, at any rate, after our driver-shepherd pointed it out to us). Making a Kodak moment of it—of this matchless vista that nature and civilization had conspired to throw up at the continent’s edge—was an entirely apt response.

I view this Web journal as an exercise in recognition, as an effort to give notice of items that catch my eye and linger in my brain pan. But the Golden Gate photo offers another kind of inspiration for my online chronicle. All writing, if it works, creates a bridge of sorts—a broad and noble span from the mind to the world, and from mind to mind. And some writing, if it’s really good, helps the reader peer through a fog, revealing signs of civilized life on the other side of it.

Clichés? Too bad, I like them.