A Pause to Give Thanks

Today in America we are celebrating Thanksgiving — a day set aside to pause and count one's blessings. And eat, of course. 

I am on my annual Thanksgiving week retreat. Normally I would be at the Abbey of Gethsemani but the monks are having the guest house refurbished and it is closed until March 2018. 

Not to be daunted, I switched abbeys and am staying at the guest house at St. Meinrad Archabbey. It is about an hour's drive west of  Louisville. 

I have found that monasteries are the quietest places and make for the perfect retreat. No one bothers me. The food is prepared and served and the cleaning up is done by someone else. 

I brought my watercolor paints and sketchbooks and two books of essays by Ann Fadiman - Ex Libris: Confession of a Common Reader and At Large and At Small: Familiar Essays. I have read both books before but am in the mood for them again. The books are small in size and comfortable to hold. The essays are thoughtful and engaging. 

Hope your day is splendid and that there is plenty of pie.

I am having Issues....

Technical difficulties caused this

First, my blogger post editor window froze yesterday after I posted my text on Charles Lamb. It is still frozen today. It must be broken. No amount of Googling can produce an answer as to why that happened or what to do to fix it.

I reverted to the old blogger interface to get this information down. Now I can't find the photos that I want to post. I have already spent an hour on all of this which is way too much time.

I had some lovely pics of the pens I wrote about the other day. I will persevere and maybe some day I will figure out how to get them onto this blog.

In the meantime, I have finished At Large and At Small by Anne Fadiman, but by now I am so frustrated with messing about trying to get this post together that I will have to write about it another day.

The Unfuzzy Lamb

Charles Lamb
aka Elia
1775-1834

Anne Fadiman bemoans the fact that reading the essays of Charles Lamb, aka Elia, has gone out of fashion. And this from her essay on him entitled "The Unfuzzy Lamb" in her collection At Large and At Small that was published in 2005. I hate to think that even fewer people are reading him now seven years later. Maybe Ms. Fadiman and I are the only ones left.

If you love essays as I do, you will be as familiar with the name Elia as you are with Michel de Montaigne.

Lamb, born in 1775, did not have a charmed life, Fadiman writes. His sister Mary lost her mind and killed their mother, what he called "the family tragedy", when he was 21. He spent the rest of his life taking care of her and working as a clerk in a mind-numbing job that he hated and at which he was not really very good.

He began his career as an essayist to make money for Mary's keep as occasionally she would have to go back to the mental hospital for a while.  He wrote for five years - 1820-1825 - for London Magazine. When he retired from the East India House he retired from writing as well.

But what he left us, Fadiman writes, are 52 witty, sometimes dark, but always entertaining comments on books, witches, roast pig, ears, chimney sweeps. Nothing seems to have escaped his notice.

It has been a few years since I read with relish Essays by Elia, but you can be sure that I will be joining his company soon. Thanks to Anne Fadiman, fan extraordinaire.