I'm feeling somewhat less overwhelmed this morning, for no particular reason, except that hours have passed and I'm still alive. Instead of going straight to work yesterday, I wasted time writing a little piece about my son's fourth-grade reaction to Huck Finn. Yet rather than making me feel worse about my workplace skills, digging those pages out of the air made me feel better, as if time wasting is my purpose on this planet.

So William Blake and I will advance on into our day together. Blake might dislike my frivolity nearly as much as Milton would have, but too bad for him. One uplifting thing about copying out the work of famous serious men is that they have no choice in the matter. As I said to Milton in Tracing Paradise,

With all due respect, J.M., you're not in charge of every story. "In some glade/Obscur'd, where highest Woods impenetrable/To Star or Sun-light, spread thir umbrage broad," there's a woman sitting alone at her desk. She's not sweeping a floor or instructing her sons or collecting eggs or hauling firewood or embracing her husband. She does all of those things every day, and she'll get back to them eventually, but right now she doesn't have time for them.

She's busy reading your book.