Kraft knows that something is wrong with his life, but he struggles to pinpoint the problem. An eminent scholar of American history, particularly liberalism, he is on a writing retreat at his cottage in Nova Scotia. Kraft sees Thea, the young woman with whom he is having an affair, and himself in the third person, as subjects of a photograph rather than through his own eyes. Kraft has spent nearly two and a half months of his writing retreat doing nothing, and his family will join him in a week or so. While he walks with Thea back to her home, Kraft runs into her father, Mr. McKnight, who fishes and keeps up his house with nineteenth-century technology. As they speak, his mind automatically produces parenthetical notations, historical facts about the world around him. All Kraft can do, he realizes, is wonder at the past and worry about the future. He, with his shambolic, cluttered life, cannot live in the present moment. Thea and her father, in their rough-hewn rural simplicity, are the opposite. They have no conception of future time and float in an eternal present. Even as Kraft spends time with Thea, all he can think about is his family's impending arrival. After Thea and Kraft make love, Kraft leaves in agitation. At the top of the hill behind their house, he cannot force himself to continue to walk — he must look back. When he does, all he can see is the dilapidation of the McKnights' home.