Fencing Bear at Prayer

It feels almost miraculous.  Everything in my life (well, almost everything) that was holding me back (funny, I feel anxious just writing that) is now, well, perhaps not gone, but markedly better. I have a whole new set of tools for thinking about my eating and my body and my weight; I even forget to count calories most days (and know that it is better to stop myself when I start and simply ask whether I am hungry), and yet, I am eating better than I ever have and ( mirabile dictu ) enjoying my food. Our home is calm and happy, no longer stuffed full of junk we don't need .   Even better, I have gone shopping several times in the past month and come home without having bought anything because I couldn't find anything that was exactly right. I have established a regular schedule for working on my research and stuck to it for nine months even though I am not on leave.  I have made good progress on my translation , as well as researched, written, sent out for review,...

I don't like the way I write. At least, not as much as I like the way some of my favorite authors--Barbara Newman, Elaine Scarry, Dorothy Sayers, J.R.R. Tolkien--do. Somehow the words just never come out the way I want them to; and yet, every time I try to write in some other way, it just seems fake, not my voice at all. I could try writing like my sister , more observationally, less argumentatively, which is not to say that she doesn't make arguments, just that she is not bound as I am to make apologies (like this one) for every claim that she makes. I wish that I could write more like my friend Barbara ; if you know her work, you will know why. She is so subtle and yet so profound in the problems that she sets; you think you are reading something simply about a particular text, and before you know it, the whole structure of medieval religious thinking has been turned inside out and laid bare. Scarry is another matter altogether: she is dense and difficult right from the...

I'm getting ready for a trip that I am taking to England next week, which means, of course, that I am making lots of lists: things to remember to pack, things to take care of before I leave, books to bring, music to put onto my iPod, libraries that I want to visit, manuscripts (particularly books of Hours) that I want to see, places that I want to go, people that I am going to want to look up. This is a lot of lists and might seem like a burden to be getting on with. But, in fact, it is remarkably pleasurable. There is something extremely satisfying about a list. I know that I am hardly the first to notice this about lists. There's even a song about it. And I'm sure I've read articles about the theory and meaning of lists.* But they fascinate nevertheless. What is it about a list that makes it so compelling? I've been keeping a list on my iPod of blog posts to be. Some of these I think that I have already written (they tend to change as I write, so I may co...