Charles Lamb
was among the wisest of foolish men. His priorities were admirably well ordered
– his sister Mary, old books, good prose, roast pig, a pipe, something to drink
and conversation. Not on the list is his thirty-three-year job as clerk with
the East India Company. Like any sensible person, and unlike his friend
Hazlitt, Lamb ignored politics. His indifference to the subject that
preoccupies so many is a mark of his maturity. I once wrote a newspaper column
suggesting passage of a law that would forbid anyone who wished to run for
public office from doing so. Only those who don’t wish to run would be
permitted, at least until they declared their intent. Politics tends to attract
the most dubious characters among us.
This past
week, two public-turned-private affairs have touched us in Houston. By telephone
I interviewed a computer scientist who had recently returned from a trip to
China. Her company had her quarantined in her Houston apartment and visited twice a day
by a nurse who monitored her vitals. Understandably, she was going stir-crazy.
A sizable number of the graduate students at my university are Chinese, and many
wear masks – an obvious reminder of how small the world is growing. My middle
son, a second-year midshipman at the U.S. Naval Academy, was scheduled to fly
with friends to Rome for spring break. On Friday, the Navy called it off. Now he's coming home to Houston.
On Thursday,
a 96-inch water main broke and flooded a nearby freeway. The city advised us
not to drink tap water without first boiling it. They lifted the advisory on
Saturday. For the first time in his life, our dog drank bottled water.
In that
March 1, 1800 letter to his friend Thomas Manning, Lamb writes: “I cannot make
these present times present to me. I read histories of the past, and I live in
them; although, to abstract senses, they are far less momentous than the noises
which keep Europe awake.”
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