I had a column about my Scrabble complaints ready to go, but thought better of it inasmuch as it seemed, in reading it over, as opaque as a mud flat after a heavy rain.

In brief, it didn’t breathe. But I did think what I said about the mouse-eaten Webster’s New International Dictionary sagging forlornly at the edge of Irene’s desk was Chekovian, she and I being the only ones left in this office to do it reverence.

I lean in closer nowadays — my sight having long ago been given in service to The Star — but my joy is no less than it ever was when I find my suppositions as to the subtleties of meanings confirmed, however archaic the words may be. (The more archaic the better, in fact.) “I knew I was right, I knew I was right!” is my invariable refrain.

The little red one in the back, which everyone else considers the arbiter now, is evidence that the world has passed us by. I imagine us sitting on a porch at teatime alternately reciting in the gloaming verses of “Horatius at the Bridge.”

“ ‘Lars Porsena of Clusium . . .’ ”    “ ‘By the Nine Gods he swore . . . !’ ”

Ah yes. . . . Well, there is little time for tea and batting Macaulay back and forth anymore; it’s coffee on the run now, and there’s barely a moment amid the frenzy and frequent tick checks to congratulate oneself on being right.

Which reminds me, I saw a most wonderful thing today, on returning to the office coffee in hand — a tick of about my height crossing Main Street.

“I bet you don’t see a sight like this here very often,” the fellow leading him said to me.

“My wife sighted four on her this morning,” I replied, glad that this chance meeting had persuaded me, who had absented himself from felicity a while, to put an antic disposition on.

We did a shoot soon after, in the garden next door, the guide on a bench perusing The Star, unaware of the titanic tick behind him, eight legs outstretched, looking on.

“Fantastic!” I said. “It’s not often that you see a man reading The Star on a bench unaware that there’s a titanic tick behind him, eight legs outstretched, looking on. Maybe this will be a fun summer after all, a parTICularly fun summer. And now I’m itching to get back to work where with renewed energy I’ll continue moving forward into the past.”

You wouldn’t think there was anything about the peaceful, shaded streets of Springs that calls to mind the architecture of Paris’s grand boulevards and bourgeois dwellings. And at first glance, there isn’t.

In Paris, the buildings (aside from those in Montmartre and the Marais, districts that survived the urban planning of the 1850s) for the most part all look the same. The walls are cream-colored stone and the roofs are slate blue; the balconies, always on the second and fifth floors, have black iron railings, and windows are in top floor dormers.

The lines formed by this uniform architecture are straight, so straight that when I stood beneath the Arc de Tri­omphe and looked to the east, I could see all the way down the Champs-Elysées to the Place de la Concord, the Tuileries gardens, and the Louvre Pyramid. I eagerly pointed this out to my boyfriend (now an ex), who, like me, was lucky enough to be studying abroad and had come to visit me from Milan, that we were standing on the royal axis, the line of monuments that are all oriented at 26 degrees, forming a straight line from the Louvre all the way to the Chateau de Versailles. This meticulous city planning felt like the eighth wonder of the world to me, but he did not seem so impressed.

The lines in Springs are not nearly so straight, nor are they so finely executed. I live in Springs on what is perhaps the least straight of these lines, the notorious and aptly, sadly named Dead Man’s curve. But just as the slate blue roofs in Paris never let you forget where you are, there are many things in Springs that are just as grounding. There is, of course, the bay, an ever present, nearly noiseless backdrop. The trees are as constant as the palatial presence of the Louvre in Paris, their cyclical change through the seasons as unwavering as the crowds in front of the Mona Lisa.

And the houses that line the streets of East Hampton, especially in the village, are similar to one another. Just like the buildings in Paris cannot be built higher than 30 meters, the buildings in the village’s historic district must conform to code. The true colonials have spawned a thousand imitations, so most of the houses in the village and many in Springs have brown shingles and white-framed windows. There are houses as similar to one another in East Hampton as the bourgeois apartments in Paris are to each other.

When I returned to East Hampton I felt like an alien, and in some ways I still do. The feeling is similar to how college students feel when coming home: slightly out of place, but content to be there, like a blurry photograph that you know would be beautiful if you could find a way to focus it. For months I had identified my surroundings by squarely cut trees, the smell of freshly baked viennoiserie wafting from the bakeries (this cliché is very, very true), and the ever present monuments of the royal axis. Back home, I was jolted by the permeating greenness of the landscape and the otherness of the ocean; I had forgotten how much I loved both. I had to relearn, and am still relearning, how to live in a natural setting with ferocious beauty that is starkly different from the uniform perfection of Paris.

While studying in Paris I was constantly reminded of the artists and writers who had made it their home: Picasso, Cezanne, Manet, Monet, Toulouse-Lautrec, Gaugin, Van Gogh, Gertrude Stein, Joyce, Ezra Pound, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, the list in endless. They all knew one another, personally and professionally. I thought that my hometown was and is just like that. Paris had the Impressionists and East Hampton, and more specifically Springs, had Abstract Expressionists. In Paris I lived 20 minutes from the Louvre (by metro), the most visited art museum in the world, and 20 from Montmartre, the district that Toulouse-Lautrec, Picasso, and Van Gogh called home. But at home, I live 1.5 minutes, driving, from Jackson Pollock’s house and studio. In Paris, I paid homage to Oscar Wilde buried in the famous Pere Lachaise cemetery, but at home I tip an invisible hat to the poet Frank O’Hara every time, which is almost every day, I drive by Green River Cemetery.

There are no fewer than 15 royal palaces in Paris despite the demise of the monarchy so many years ago, and there are parts of the city that still look as they did in the Middle Ages. When I drove home from East Hampton Village for the first time since returning to America, it struck me that nothing had changed in my absence. The village green was where it had been for some 300 years, the intersection at North Main was as annoying as ever, the harbor still glistened like polished glass in the early morning, and the Springs General Store still had the cheeky sign on the front door that reminds customers to pay for their groceries.

I thought about President Mitterand’s modern art installations in the 1980s and how angry some Parisians were that he dared to put what they considered a glass monstrosity in the courtyard of the Louvre. What would the Sun King (fresh in the minds of the French if not in his grave) think? I thought about how strange a glass and steel construction would look in front of the Mulford Farm. I thought about how truly disgusted I would be by a strip mall in Springs. And every time a new health food joint popped up, I rolled my eyes and kept going to Goldberg’s.

Whereas the French attitude is more along the lines of “this is how we do it because this is Paris and this is How It Has Always Been Done,” the East End mentality is more “this is how we do it, because why would we want to do it any other way.” As I stood in my backyard on my first sunny day back in America, surrounded by a natural, ethereal haze, which wrapped itself around Springs in a changing, never ceasing, cadmium green wash, the air smelling slightly salty, I felt hard pressed to disagree.

Lucia Akard is an intern at The Star this summer.

A career-guidance test we took in high school that supposedly scientifically assessed students’ personal characteristics had me ranking high on what was called persuasiveness. The suggestion was that I would make a good lawyer.

With the benefit of hindsight, however, I think it’s a good thing I didn’t follow through on that career advice: What sort lawyer is too impatient to wade through fine print, as I’ve always been?

Even though I liked writing as a teenager, I never imagined that I would one day find myself trying to persuade readers to do this or think that by what I wrote in print. You might say I lucked out where professions are concerned when I married into the East Hampton Star family. Eventually, and for more than 20 years, I put my persuasiveness to the test by writing editorials, attempting to affect readers’ opinions, and through them the body politic.

Over the years, I’ve tended to lean on others to decipher even the most important fine print. Legal documents? Financial paperwork? Contracts? Manuals for electronic devises or coffee makers? Like many of us, I would much rather learn by doing — or by attempting.

Of course, that doesn’t always work. Take Facebook, for example.

I know you “friend” people and they can friend you, but I have no idea why I am alerted every day to massive amounts of posts from people I hardly know. Are these friends of friends? I am sure it would be possible to turn off these notifications, if I only had the patience to wade into the dreaded how-to settings pages. And why do I get photos and videos and links to various sites on the Internet from people I have never met at all and who appear to have no connection to my Facebook friends, either? It remains a mystery.

On the Jitney recently, I found myself breaking a personal rule against idle chatter. I had shut down my computer, fearing that it would lose battery power, and was reading The New York Times. As I folded and unfolded the pages awkwardly, I noticed that the woman sitting next to me was reading The Times, too, but on a small bright screen. Before we reached 39th Street, where we both got off, she had shown me her MacBook Air.  

This seatmate would have been off the charts on that persuasiveness test. Unlike my repurposed and clunky laptop, her MacBook Air displayed text that was big, bright, and legible; unlike mine, her computer’s battery, she said, would last all day. She showed me a few of the apps on it, including DuLingo, which helps you learn a new language by actually hearing it. I would like one of those MacBook Airs. (And my family can consider this a hint, hint for my upcoming Big Birthday in September.)

What really impressed me, though, was this friendly and tech-savvy strang­er’s advice on how to skip reading all the boring words in how-to manuals. One just asks Google a question and gets the answer, she said. How is it possible that I had never tried this before?

“How do I get rid of Facebook notifications?” I asked Google. A thousand answers popped up immediately.

By the time we got off the bus, we had agreed to friend each other, and I felt a new dawn on the horizon. If I can ditch all the fine-print instructions in life by asking direct questions to Google, maybe it will turn out I’m not so technically inept, after all. Maybe I am, in fact, tech-proficient enough to deserve a MacBook Air.

Spring agrees with Leo the pig. Regular readers of this column may recall that about two years ago, over my desperate protests, two of the women of our household insisted that we get a pet of the cloven-hoof variety.

My objections centered on the sense that I would end up taking care of it, and anyway, there was no way it was ever going to remain 10 pounds as an adult, as the Texas trailer park breeder they had found on the Internet said it would. I was correct on both counts. First, because I get up the earliest in the family, and the dang pig will not leave me alone until I make its breakfast, and second, well, pigs are pigs.

The last time we weighed Leo, he was well over 40 pounds. When a tile setter who had grown up on a farm in Greece was at our house a week ago, the subject came up. He estimated that Leo would top out at more than 50. When we get around to replacing the battery in the bathroom scale, we will settle the matter.

Though small for a pig, Leo is not 10 pounds. Picture a pinkish, spiky Labrador with short legs and you’ll get the idea. Part of the reason Leo appears to enjoy warmer weather is that the lawn becomes a relatively expansive food source for him. He will disappear for a while in the morning then return with his snout covered in soil, the interim having been spent rooting near the chicken coop or on the margin of the swamp in our backyard. Then it is time for a scratch, rubbing his flanks the way a bear might on a shaggy-backed wild cherry.

After these exertions, Leo might retire to a spot in the sun. As I left for work the other day, he had set himself down on the brick walkway with a low bank of grass on which to prop up his massive head. 

By coincidence this week I spoke with a therapist who, as it turned out, had been the original owner of a hand-me-down couch we keep on the porch. Leo, I said, had taken to the dark brown velvet cushions now that the weather was warm, and often beds down on it for his afternoon nap.

The therapist paused, laughed, and said something to the effect that it was the best outcome possible for an old psychoanalytic couch.

Leo, if he could understand it, would surely agree. But then again, he’d probably be too busy dreaming about grass and what he might have for supper.

“Oh good,” I said as I cast a glance at my phone on returning to the office on the cusp of Memorial Day weekend. “No one’s called.”

I’d been to Citarella and BookHampton, and was pleased to tell Bill at the bookstore that it was “just as crowded as Citarella,” which was saying something inasmuch as they had six people at Citarella’s registers and still couldn’t keep up with the volume.

“Buy it now cuz it will all be gone by nightfall!” I said to Mayra and Russ once the relative paradise of The Star was regained, adding that the volume of Milton’s poetry I had bought at BookHampton weighed almost as much as the broccoli rabe, onions, garlic, lemons, smoked prosciutto, and avocados I’d bought at Citarella. All but the avocados are to go into the orecchiette I’m making to feed the 5,000 (not really that many) at a family gathering/baby shower tomorrow.

Of course I won’t eat it, being on a low-cholesterol diet, which is to say primarily hummus, yogurt, and oatmeal. Mary force-fed me some chocolate ice cream last night, but otherwise I’ve been clean these past few weeks. I’ve not given up drinking though. In fact I told Mary recently that were I to attend an A.A. meeting, I’d get up and say, “My name is Jack Graves and I still use floppy disks,” which is not quite true, but almost.

Another week and I am not yet saved, though I know everything is saved on my computer, which is good news. I no longer get so tense wondering whether what I’ve written will ever reappear, as if on a page.

Frankly, I had second thoughts about toting to The Star Milton’s complete poetic works, for, as I learned, in thumbing through it, it wasn’t a poem I’d been looking for after all, but a prose work, “Areopagitica,” that might help me better to understand Blake, whom I’m reading about now.

“Oh, I’m reading Milton too!” a woman next to me at the counter said. “Is ‘Paradise Lost’ in it?”

“You want it?” I said, half-seriously, resisting the urge to make an analogy to the Hamptons.

“Actually,” I said to Bill. “I think I’m trying to redeem my failed college education — I’m reading all these poets I was supposed to have read 50 years ago. And now I don’t know if I’ll have the time.”

I asked him if he’d seen, by the way, the article on time in this week’s New Yorker.

“Mary wants very much to read it,” I said, “but she doesn’t know if she’ll ever be able to find the time to!” And with that I was off, with plenty of food and with plenty of food for thought.

There is an old saw that says you should build your second house first.  

What?

Well, by the time you are on your second house, you have learned enough from the first one to apply that knowledge to the next one. That makes whacky sense, but it just sort of works if you are doing a renovation.

Consider that your first/original house (inherited, bachelor digs, divorce gift) no longer works for you, but you are used to it and you love the location. You know where the sun comes up and what you would want to look at if only the windows were wider, taller, or moved a foot to the left or right.

So call this future renovation the not-quite-second house because half of it you learned from and the other half you have no clue about.

Naturally, you expect the plan drawer-upper to find certain mistakes in your semi-architectural sketches and notes. (Do not.) You expect the builder-project manager to take you aside and say, “Ya know, if you just thought about having that cellar be a” — read: “trophy” — “basement you would have a lot more space. . . .”

But not everyone tells you stuff in ways you can hear it. We got a cellar and not a “trophy” basement. Twelve years ago, who really knew about the (under)groundswell of the magical third floor that can exist below grade?! But I digress.

We got the house we asked for. Really. But we didn’t get or didn’t really hear the expertise we might have been given. Herewith some of what we learned 12 years after the fact.

We should have:

• Given ourselves a first-floor bedroom with an en-suite bathroom for guests and/or old people with stair issues. (We didn’t do it, and that was a lesson learned too late.)

• Gotten the (trophy) basement with inside stairs. Didn’t, because it ate up too much inside floor space, and I thought basements always had spiders and were basically creepy. In the early 2000s we had never thought about a “third-floor” basement. Amazing, since it’s now such a part of the building vernacular.

• Planned for gutters instead of having to retrofit a few years ago.

• Considered a really big mudroom.

• Known that living here year round we would have seasonal clothes that would not really fit in the summer-house closets.

• Remembered that everyone needs their own room/office/den/cave/space. Sharing is complicated.

• Had the ceilings painted glossy from the start.

One thing we did do: Put the washing machine near where the clothes live (second floor). Lugging laundry is overrated exercise.

The fun/frustrating list is what we would love to change, add, tweak. (Are you listening, New York State Lottery?) I will be leaving “pie in the sky” for another “Relay.” Stay tuned.

Here’s what we were surprised by last year: That the washing machine would wear out (after 12 years). We don’t do that much laundry, really, but apparently they have a built-in obsolescence. Well, replacement wasn’t the worst surprise. The real surprise was that the new washer and dryer (stacking, smallest available) would no longer fit into that little closet we had built to house them. Now they make them deeper to make them narrower. This required an emergency robbing-Peter-to-pay-Paul solution, expanding the closet by diminishing the room behind. You win by loss, sort of. Well, there is no predicting old age, in people or machines, but the mechanical engineers really pulled a fast one.

Last year we were also surprised by a massive leak in the ceiling of the kitchen. The ceiling paint held the leak for a while, but the ballooning ceiling was alarming. “Call the super! Wait, we are the super; this is a house.” When we found a fixer we had to open the roof to find out that our 12-year-old kitchen roof had had a slow leak all along. When the kitchen skylight had to be replaced along with the roof, we learned from the fixer that the flashing at the true top of a skylight is abundant, less so at the bottom edge. The flashing around our kitchen skylight was basically nil. Looking back, we guess the building crew just didn’t realize that top edge of a skylight has more flashing — and when putting them in backwards they cut away the extra flashing at the lower edge. It turns out that all of our skylights are backwards. Big surprise!

Then there are the things you wish someone had pointed out before or during the renovation. These are the things nobody warns you about because they assume you know. To wit, a one-story house sees the side of the garage, a two-story house . . . well, the view is no longer the side of the garage; the view is the roof of the garage. Surprise! You will want a new roof there, too.

Another surprise is ice dams.

Nobody tells you when you become a year-round summer person to get the snow away from your shingles. It’s hard enough to shovel a path on the deck, why would I clear the snow away from the house? Why would I ask someone to do that?

ICEDAMN, or damned ice dam, that’s why.

On the verge of our 12th spring, we were in for yet another little surprise.

During recent winters, snow piled on our nice back deck. We cleared paths to the driveway, but that was all we did. Twelve winters of snow/ice/melting/ freezing and more snow got up and under the lowest shingles at the join with the deck. It snuck into the house and buckled the floor in our pantry along the outside wall. How long did it take? I have no idea. It was only today, when I put a few empty bottles on the floor of the pantry and the bottles fell over, that I came face to face with the result. On my hands and knees (no easy task) I saw that a corner floorboard was heaved and dark with water stain. While the area was free of mold and damp, clearly the floor was compromised. Outside the shingles kiss the deck. My guess, though I cannot yet swear to it, is there is no flashing around our deck. Very likely the building crew/skylight putter-inners, who also built our deck, never flashed where it met the house.

Surprise, house, it is your 12th birthday. Feeling old, are ya?

Rebuilding the deck is not an option right now, when we really need that en-suite bathroom (see above), so shoveling is in my future. Unless you are still listening, Lottery God.

Crap happens in and to your house.

Some are things you can live with or fix (leaks, ice dams), and some things you just have to live with no matter what. When your neighbor’s house becomes a monster construction site, their pretty willow tree drops stuff in your gutters, which clog, overflow, and get mildewed on the shady side of your house; when other neighbor’s hedge grows so high and you lose your cutting garden to shade.

Not to worry.

Crap happens.

Take heart, though, because going forward, in this area, there will be fewer and fewer opportunities for renovations. Why? Because everything is a teardown. My house, your house, the house down the road. Anything built after 1900 and not considered historic is destined to be rubble as soon as the closing is over.

So, dear future renovators, if you inherit your mom’s house, fix it up for you and your lifestyle. Pay as close attention as you can, but don’t go nuts because the house you are in, when sold, will be razed, and in place will grow a brand-new, trophy-basemented, en-suite-bathroomed, gambrel-roofed, 12-foot-ceil­ing­ed house — built by a guy who still might put the skylights in backwards.

Just remember, when you sell, it will be for the land and the location, so patch what’s broken and get on with your life. No worries, mon.

Durell Godfrey, a contributing photographer for The Star, loves watching buildings being built because “That’s the stuff that dreams are made of.”

About six dozen yellow irises greeted me on a gray morning this week, testimony to a place where others have lived and gardened before. The old lilacs aren’t as bountiful as I remember, waiting perhaps for  judicial pruning, but there are enough for bouquets.

To be sure, I am hardly a gardener, neglectful as I am of almost everything necessary to qualify. I’ve been known to put the wrong plants in the wrong places and then gone on to mourn those that are lost. The deer are responsible for more depredations than I am, though, and I just can’t bring myself to put up fencing. The deer relished the rose bushes, although two or three may survive, and it probably is true that they were put in where there wasn’t enough sun. I’m not sure what eradicated the astilbe, although, like the lilies of the valley, they probably were choked out by a persistent groundcover, which I have failed to get rid of because it is the earliest thing hereabouts to flower.

The irises, a bounty from someone’s effort in times past, are not the only pleasures of the garden this spring. They followed the blooming of four or five varieties of yellow narcissus, with various clutches of petals. And, while it is true that an earlier generation’s tiger lilies in another part of the yard were long since executed by the deer, their places have been taken by batches of white narcissus with a fragrant scent reminiscent of paper whites that are blooming still.

The white narcissus are coinciding now with flowering viburnum bushes, which although misshapen by the deer so that they now branch out into straight shelves some four feet off the ground, are attractive nevertheless. And I shouldn’t ignore the forsythia, which decorated the place earlier in the season.

I don’t think there will be further come-by-chance surprises in the garden this summer. Instead, I will watch over the nepeta and lavender I put in the beds last year, which are said to be deer resistant and may therefore survive.  

Eastern Long Island (the Hamptons, if you insist) is a world of extraordinary gardens, designed by dedicated amateurs and talented professionals and nurtured with love — and lots of work. But there is something to be said about old backyards.

One of the small pleasures at the office occurs when the latest copy of The Vineyard Gazette arrives. We have had a subscription to this lovely, old-fashioned broadsheet for a long time now, and it is always interesting to see how that island, not all that dissimilar from the East End of Long Island, copes with some of the same pressures.

Two stories in the May 23 Gazette could have been set here. In one, residents were outraged at the quality of the material placed to replenish an eroded beach. The Town of Oak Bluffs will remove an unspecified quantity of dredging spoils, presumably as nasty as they sound, from two locations.

Though protesters have not taken to the streets here, as they did on the Vineyard, it has been noted that the fill passing for sand at Georgica and at Montauk’s downtown beaches is less than ideal. As here, the Vineyard spoils met state standards for purity, which, according to the descriptions in the Gazette, are far from the cleanest, best sand. “Sludge,” some picketers at Inkwell Beach called it.

Elsewhere on the same page of the paper, there was a story about the Tisbury selectmen reducing the length of time that visiting boaters can anchor off Vineyard Haven out of concern about water pollution.

Two pages on was a discussion of whether the Vineyard’s five school districts should be combined. With a sole superintendent, that island is already a step ahead of the South Fork, where each district not only has an administrative head but most have at least one principal.

As here, the districts all send their older students to a single high school. Past opposition has included fear of losing local control, but variances among the offerings at the Vineyard’s lower schools has meant that some kids are better prepared than others, depending on where they come from. Standardizing elementary education might come with advantages, the idea’s backers said.

Here, as there, it is difficult to say how the school consolidation debate will play out. James Weiss, the Vineyard’s superintendent, told a recent meeting of that island’s League of Women Voters, “We have an outstanding school system. If we could do it better and more efficiently, we should do it.” That sentiment, and the Vineyard’s progress on this and other questions, are worth watching.

We have Danny Walsh, the golfing partner of my brother-in-law, to thank for what I’ve called “the Taj Mahal of outdoor showers.”

I say “we,” but historically I’ve been the only one to use it, logging with Jeffersonian attention each year’s first and last days. The women generally have been wary inasmuch as the one I built some years ago, using remnants of the house’s original deck and a pair of purloined swinging saloon-style doors, wasn’t sufficiently high enough — a genuine concern, I’ll admit, when the tall house next door housed innumerable tenants.

But now everything’s fine, more than fine. Solid, sweet-smelling, with a wonderful bench, and with sides high enough so that all is hidden from view. In there the other day, it occurred to us that we could, with our feet up, read our books the livelong day with no one knowing where we were.

The further the seasonal feeling of invasion encroaches, the more one needs a private place, away from the madding crowd. Already, my Facebook page — something to which I vowed I’d never yield, having consigned it to braggarts and cranks before I began to delight in photos of our grandchildren — is littered with cars twisted and crushed in bloody accidents.

It is impossible, of course, to shut out the vanity and ugliness astride in the world, though, at times, especially when I’m in the outdoor shower, under the sun and the leafed-out trees, I do my best.

The world: “Where but to think is to be full of sorrow . . . where beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes. . . .” (Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale”)

“It is an easy thing to rejoice in the tents of prosperity: Thus could I sing & thus rejoice: but it is not so with me.” (Blake’s “The Four Zoas”)

We must be sensitive and empathetic, I agreed, when Mary and I were talking — as we often do — about the seemingly untold amount of suffering in the world, but we can’t allow our souls to be buried in it.

And with that I vanished, towel in hand.   

You really have to see the Taj Mahal in person to appreciate it. I don’t know if that’s a cliché — it probably is, but then, I’m not much of a world traveler. Still, a few years back I did catch a morning train from Jaipur to visit Shah Jahan’s “ultimate monument to love,” the mausoleum and funerary garden honoring his late wife, Mumtaz Mahal.

My then-brother-in-law and I stood on line for an hour, at least, before finally entering the grounds where, in the distance, the glorious structure rose from the earth, all white marble and sandstone and symmetry. A Mughal poet is said to have written that, in the mausoleum, “the whiteness of the true dawn is reflected, causing the viewer to forget his desire to move towards the highest heaven.” Sublime beauty, all around.

Until, I regret to report, while circumambulating the magnificent edifice, I came across a girl of, I guessed, 12 or 13. The girl, an Indian, apparently found it all somewhat less impressive than did the thousands of other visitors that day. At least, that was my inescapable conclusion as I watched her engrave her initials, with a stone, into a wall of the Taj Mahal. I sighed, heavily.

I was thinking of that girl on Saturday night, leaning against the bar at the Stephen Talkhouse in Amagansett as Henry Saint Clair Fredericks, a legendary blues musician who goes by the name Taj Mahal, delivered a solo performance as sublimely beautiful as his namesake.

I’d seen Taj Mahal in New York a couple times — once at the late, great Tramps, and once, 15 years ago, in Central Park, when Sheryl Crow played a free concert with some very high-profile guests. I’ll never forget the reaction of Keith Richards, elegantly wasted, as he turned around to realize he was sharing the stage with Taj Mahal, who had performed ahead of Mr. Richards’s band in “The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus” back in 1968.

But this was a solo show, just Taj and a guitar. Strong and spirited at 72, he kept a full house spellbound with playful, masterful performances of his easygoing country blues. “Corrina” and “Fishin’ Blues,” to name a couple, never sounded so cool.

“Here’s a little tip that I would like to relate: Many fish bites if ya’ got good bait,” he sang. “I’m a-goin’ fishin’, yes I’m goin’ fishin’, and my baby goin’ fishin’ too.” Here was wisdom, dispensed with a song and a most infectious smile.

About that rapt audience, though: As is so often the case, more than a few Talkhouse patrons, who had paid $150 or more to attend, seemed blissfully unaware that a concert was in progress, an intimate solo performance at that. Standing directly in front of my date and me, a woman spent about half of the show peering into her smartphone, furiously sending and receiving text messages. The other half of the show? That was occupied by the reading back of the correspondence, aloud, to her companion. I sighed, heavily, again.

I guess it doesn’t matter what side of the world you are on, or if it’s Taj Mahal or the Taj Mahal. Nothing, truly nothing, is sacred. Was it always this way?

We left and walked home, a splendid time had, but a nagging annoyance hanging overhead. Up Main Street, a line from Van Morrison’s “Astral Weeks” replayed in my mind: “I’m nothing but a stranger in this world.”

Christopher Walsh is a reporter at The Star and a musician himself.