'In Other Words, Life!'

“I have been so distracted with business and one thing or other, I have not had a quiet quarter of an hour for epistolary purposes.”

Email is among the welcome blessings of the age. Thanks to the “epistolary purposes” it enables, I can be effortlessly in touch with friends, family and acquaintances, some of whom I’m unlikely ever to meet in person. Has any human invention ever made expressions of long-distance gratitude so simple? No stamps, no envelopes to address, though keeping up with the swelling volume of email requires a measure of discipline – o felix culpa -- not always readily available. Read collections of letters from the past – Cowper’s and Keats’ come to mind – and note how often they begin letters with apologies for epistolary tardiness. The sentence quoted above – Charles Lamb to his Quaker friend Bernard Barton on this date, Dec. 23, in 1822 – is typical. Lamb moves on to another conventional subject and, of course, treats it with Lambian unconventionality:

“Christmas, too, is come, which always puts a rattle into my morning skull. It is a visiting, unquiet, unquakerish season. I get more and more in love with solitude, and proportionately hampered with company. I hope you have some holidays at this period. I have one day,--Christmas Day; alas! too few to commemorate the season.”

By “holiday,” Lamb means a day off from work. Barton was a poet who worked as a clerk in Messrs. Alexander’s Bank, and Lamb clerked for the East India Company. Both complained that work kept them from happier pursuits.

“All work and no play dulls me. Company is not play, but many times hard work. To play, is for a man to do what he pleases, or to do nothing,--to go about soothing his particular fancies. I have lived to a time of life to have outlived the good hours, the nine-o'clock suppers, with a bright hour or two to clear up in afterwards. Now you cannot get tea before that hour, and then sit gaping, music bothered perhaps, till half-past twelve brings up the tray; and what you steal of convivial enjoyment after, is heavily paid for in the disquiet of to-morrow's head.”

With Lamb, that no doubt included morning-after hangovers. Lamb then expresses a thought I have often had:

“I could almost envy you to have so much to read. I feel as if I had read all the books I want to read. Oh, to forget Fielding, Steele, etc., and read ’em new!”

When I suggest a reader, especially a young one, try Montaigne or Henry James for the first time, I always feel a pang of envy. I may be a more seasoned reader today, but I’ll never again know the rush of first acquaintance. Lamb adds: “Books are good, and pictures are good, and money to buy them therefore good; but to buy time,--in other words, life!”