John McPhee

It has somehow become 1978 and for 10 or 15 years I have been intending to attempt a piece of writing called “Six Princetons”—the school as it has variously appeared to someone who was born in Princeton and has lived in Princeton all his life.

That August I returned to the town in New Jersey where I had been born 50 years before. It looked much the same. Any town would, after five weeks.There was a great deal of waiting mail—08540, 08540, 08540.

Pools and pools and pools of chocolate— 50,000-pound, 90,000-pound, Olympic-length pools of chocolate— in the conching rooms in the chocolate factory in Hershey, Pa. Big, aromatic rooms. Chocolate, as far as the eye can see.