Dickens, Ghosts and Me
Maureen Dowd wrote a column about this time of year as it relates to Charles Dickens, ghosts and, ultimately, to me, the reader. I wrote in reply that it is in these uncommonly quiet days of uninterrupted moments, this oddly singular time to myself with its disarming quality of unbusied mornings and home-brewed, not office- or deli-brewed, mugs of coffee by the fire…with family and all its digital and vibrating pinging soundlessly asleep… with even Manhattan itself simmered down to a calm and coiled up under grateful blankets…that I am allowed the echoing solitude of the Dickensian gift of ‘shutting out nothing,’ The rare reflection is not because of a greater or more mystical belief in anything greater than self. Because it is me, in all my good and bad, with whom I must come to mortal, end of story grips. And it is my greater self, my children, who give me rest from the ghosts and hope for the stories that I can write, edit, and tell in the wisps of time inside my head
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/25/opinion/sunday/dowd-a-victorian-christmas.html