I feel guilty when I don’t manage to write for a day or so. It’s not like there’s a massive audience hanging on my every post, but I get mad at myself when I fall out of the habit of offering up at least a daily snippet of my psyche.
Yesterday, I was pretty swamped with work and bad work-vibes. This morning, I decided to read some Montaigne rather than engage in my usual routine of scanning through the 400 or so items in my RSS reader. I’m pretty close to finishing Book Two of the essays and, while I don’t feel as though I’m in a race, I did find the final three essays pretty compelling and complementary: Of three good women (pp. 683-690), Of the most outstanding men (pp. 690-696), and Of the resemblance of children to fathers (pp. 696-725).
I’ll try to write about them this weekend (I’m still working on the last one), but I’m traveling to Atlanta on Sunday for a conference, so I may have to pare back. Regardless, M. managed to help me get over my guilt with his intro to Of the resemblance . . .:
This bundle of so many disparate pieces is being composed in this manner: I set my hand to it only when pressed by too unnerving an idleness, and nowhere but at home. Thus it has built itself up with diverse interruptions and intervals, as occasions sometimes detain me elsewhere for several months.