An added attraction at the San Clemente home where we have been staying is a collection of at least a dozen paperback books containing cartoons from The Far Side.

I can page through those for 20, 25 minutes at a pop, smiling at many of the (typically) single-panel cartoons that so often tweak science and mock the human race for its egotism. At some significant fraction of them, I nod with admiration as I marvel at the insidious wit.

And in nearly every case, during or shortly after my viewing of the cartoons, I find myself musing over why Gary Larson, the man who did The Far Side and turned it into an extremely lucrative endeavor, gave up doing the cartoon 20 years ago, walking away from his work at the height of its popularity, at the age of 44.

It strikes me as a bit bizarre and perhaps even sad that his decision to give it up kept a generation from knowing about Larson’s funny, insightful work.

Back to the cartoons. So many of them are really good and most of the rest are definitely worth looking at. Some small fraction — say, 2 percent — do not really work.

But a “hit” rate of 98 percent … not many artists manage that.

Two of them stick in my mind.

The first shows dorky (as always) people and animals inside a room. They appear to be holding cocktail glasses. In the upper half of the panel an elephant appears to be angry, enraged. In the lower half of the panel is a piano.

And the caption is something like: “The party was going splendidly until Tantor noticed the piano.”

Piano keys typically have ivory surfaces, and much of that ivory came from the tusks of elephants. Tantor (and the name is brilliant, in itself, suggesting exactly the sort of name elephant handlers would give a pachyderm) knows this “ivory on pianos” thing full well, though the cretins at the party may not, and what promises to be a stamping outbreak of righteous anger is obvious.

And then there is my personal No. 1 Far Side cartoon.

It shows some sort of newfangled flying machine, in the background, with the hatch opened.

To the left are a variety of dinosaurs, including just the tail-end of a body of an extremely large dino.

Approaching that particular dinosaur is a balding, fat man (aren’t we all) in a lab coat, raising what appears to be a spear or long stick as he advances.

And the caption is something like: “Moments later, Professor Murray and his time machine came to a violent end, thus failing to resolve the debate over whether dinosaurs were cold-blooded or warm-blooded.”

(See, the stick is an enormous rectal thermometer, and the dinosaur is not going to react to that probe well, but only a human — and especially one with lots of book knowledge but a lack of practical wisdom — would be reckless/stupid enough to make the attempt to take the dino’s temperature in such a fashion.)

Which, of course, reminds me of another great panel.

It shows a courtroom. A judge is in the background, and a single man, apparently a lawyer, is on the left, and sitting in the witness chair is an alligator or crocodile with one of its front legs closed in a fist.

The caption? “Of course I did it in cold blood! I’m a reptile!”

And Larson did thousands of these — well, one a day for 15 years, which works out to more than 5,000.

And after 15 years of turning out the cartoon, he quit. And if he has done even one more panel in the style of those that took newspaper comics pages by storm … we are not aware of it.

Which represents one of the most abrupt and complete cessations of an artist doing what he did best, at least in the past half century.

Over the years, his fans have speculated why he quit, with a bit of a underlying suggestion that he somehow owed it to the rest of us to keep going.

One explanation, appearing in the pages of Time magazine 12 years ago, is that Larson wanted to go out on top because he “felt a sense of completion”.

Time quoted him as saying: “We all have an innate desire to push a rock up a hill, and I felt I had pushed the rock up to the top of the hill, to beat that analogy to death.”

He had nothing more to say about butterfly collectors or mad scientists or monsters under beds.

He has asked that his cartoons not be uploaded on the web, a request that (of course) was never likely to be honored. I will not link to any of the cartoons, but they are not hard to find.

I was going to suggest that buying one of his compilations would be the best way to honor the man, but he apparently is more interested in jazz guitar than what he did for those 15 years. And he apparently doesn’t need the money.

But at least buying a compilation would be the best way to compensate an artist for his work, in the internet age, when so much is “borrowed”.

He may not be known to anyone born since about 1980, but his cartoons are perhaps more important now than ever before because of the age we live in — of climate change, of mass extinctions, of arrogant humans not thinking through what it means to build another coal-powered energy plant — or trying to take the temperature of a dinosaur with a rectal thermometer.