Finite Time

There seems to be a limit to the number of different things I can keep going at the same time. The White Queen told Alice that in her youth, by practicing for half-an-hour a day, she could sometimes believe as many as six impossible things before breakfast. Now I am neither in my youth nor is believing things – impossible or otherwise – the difficulty I face, but still ...

This morning I made a list of the things I am working on and it is fairly daunting.

My major volunteer interest is as a director at Morningside Gardens.

I have named four current intellectual interests:

Pope’s Dunciad
Genealogy
Blogging
Literature (i.e., current reading)

But the taxonomy is idiosyncratically arbitrary. Blogging, for example, includes my current theological and biblical field reading – for example, Richard Hooker and Dominic Crossan – as well as my leftish political interests. Blogging also includes the blogs I read. I try to keep up with developments in Anglican land and with some, but not all, of the progressive Anglican blogs.

The Dunciad category shares with Blogging my current reading of Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair, inspired by a recent non-wedding in Smithfield, not to mention my currently inactive Dunciad blog. Literature currently consists of Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time.

Then there are recreational pursuits. Here I chiefly name music and light fiction.

These are some of the things I do by myself -- they don't include my share of household tasks or much of my joint life with Liz. It's no wonder I make such slow progress.