By Stuart Mitchner

Here are two thoughts about the power outage that occurred around 11 p.m. Monday night as I was writing about Princeton’s role in J.D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey, a first edition of which is among the featured volumes in the upcoming Friends of the Library Book Sale.

First, it gave me an excuse to get out my little booklight and dive at random into Shakespeare, the same refuge I found when Sandy hit. As the power came on I was reading aloud, with requisite angst, the last lines of Shylock’s Act III rant in The Merchant of Venice: “… loss upon loss! the thief gone with so much, and so much to find the thief; and no satisfaction, no revenge: nor no ill luck stirring but what lights on my shoulders; no sighs but of my breathing; no tears but of my shedding.”

Second thought: it could have been worse, if, say, the television had gone dark during the previous night’s NLCS Game 2 after the Giants came back to tie the Cardinals on a wild pitch in the top of the ninth. The outage would have deprived Cardinal fans like myself of the brief stunned transition between dejection and joy as the uncanny Kolten Wong lofts a mighty walk-off home run on the second pitch thrown by Sergio Romo, who looks like he could have been a captain of the guard in Shylock’s Venice. more