Dickens, Ghosts and Me
Maureen Dowd wrote a column about this time of year as it relates to Charles Dickens, ghosts and 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 by the fire while life’s digital and vibrating pinging stayed soundlessly asleep… while 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 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 a new-life 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