Poised on the edge of the Octogenarian Age, Hezekiah Hopewell, palaverer extraordinaire, reads Moby Dick and talks, talks, talks. Hezekiah drives around through the fall of 2019 with his nephew Hiram — “a man steeped in self-rectitude, ineptitude, rednecktitude” — in a rusted old Jeep through rural north Florida, cogitating all the while and indulging himself in logorrhea, or “spouting-out-the-mouth disease.” Inspired by Bohumil Hrabal’s novel in one sentence, Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age, U.R. Bowie’s Cogitations cogitates on a wide variety of issues and themes:

The prevalence of self-declared Messiahs in human history, the outrageous cost of dental care in the U.S., how to train a pet lizard to bark, beg, and fetch, ways of committing suicide, including holding your breath, the smell of irradiated horse chestnut leaves in Kiev, autumn of 1986, modern-day hate-drenched America, the way global warming threatens the frozen sighs of seals, polar bears, and Eskimos in Alaska, how beautiful old words are dying out in our wordless, incoherent age, the Christian ascetics known as Stylites, the ephemeral three-day existence of the Florida love bug, how to make a good living selling ambergris gathered from the guts of sperm whales, why Jonah in the bible was vomited out of a gross big fish onto dry land, why there are no Whys on Earth (because there are no Becauses), and much, much, much more.

What has Hezekiah Hopewell done with his long life? Well, he has been married to four different women. Lucky for him, since he has never had a job and his wives have supported him. He has not really done much of anything but read books. Now, fast approaching deep old age, where is his ever-going-forward getting him? To the same place all of our ever-going-forward — really more of a circling round and round — is getting the rest of us here on God’s green Earth.