'You May Extract Honey from Everything'

On Monday I looked at x-rays of myself from the lumbar region north and saw for the first time the effects of scoliosis, stenosis and osteoarthritis. My spine bends to the east like a snake (I thought of Pope’s "a wounded snake [that] drags its slow length along" in Essay on Criticism), and the discs and vertebrae are alternately black and white and resemble three octaves on the keyboard, with a few keys missing. No surgery, for the moment. Steroid shots, anti-inflammatory medication and swimming therapy. I’m fortunate, but any encounter with health-care professionals leaves me discouraged. I go numb.

Afterward, I needed a pep talk and Charles Lamb came to the rescue. On this date, Nov. 13, in 1798, he writes to his friend Robert Lloyd: “You said that ‘this World to you seemed drain’d of all its sweets!’ At first I had hoped you only meant to insinuate the high price of Sugar! but I am afraid you meant more.” Lamb, a morale officer of genius, is just getting warmed up:

“O Robert, I don’t know what you call sweet. Honey and the honeycomb, roses and violets, are yet in the earth. The sun and the moon yet reign in Heaven, and the lesser lights keep up their pretty twinklings. Meats and drinks, sweet sights and sweet smells, a country walk, spring and autumn, follies and repentance, quarrels and reconcilements, have all a sweetness by turns. Good humour and good nature, friends at home that love you, and friends abroad that miss you, you possess all these things, and more innumerable, and these are all sweet things.”

I’ll append the prose of Ford Madox Ford, a good job, seeing my sons again at Thanksgiving and Christmas, Lester Young’s Kansas City sessions, a wife who is starting to understand me, coffee first thing in the morning and the verse of John Dryden. Lamb adds: “You may extract honey from everything; do not go a gathering after gall.”