This is the first day since Tuesday when I have been alone long enough to even think about writing to you. The Huizinga quotations I managed to copy out are very nearly the sum total of my reading, if one discounts the Amherst police log (man tries to get restaurant employees to rub him with a bagel; woman hurls salt and pepper shakers around dining establishment). Thanksgiving weekend involved food and food and food punctuated by games and games and games. For variety we visited an impressive beaver dam. Reading was beside the point, except insofar as it involved recipes and Monopoly disputes.

But back to those Huizinga quotations. On my way out of the house on Wednesday I snatched up his Autumn of the Middle Ages, a book I'd last read maybe a decade ago. Here's what the jacket copy says about him: "Born in 1872, [he] became professor of history at the University of Leiden in 1915 and taught there until 1942, when the Nazis closed the university and held him hostage until shortly before his death in 1945." This book was first published in Dutch in 1919; yet while "now recognized . . . for its quality and richness as history," it was initially "criticized . . . for being too 'old-fashioned' and 'too literary.'"

I am neither a scholar nor a historian, and I'm depending on an English translation rather than the original Dutch. Nonetheless, I believe in both this book's historical richness and its literary quality. The prose really is stunningly beautiful, and the links it makes between the original medieval chronicles and a twentieth-century comprehension of the mood of the people feel intuitively true, at least to me. Moreover, they make sense to me as a writer. "In the exaggeration, one can detect the underlying truth." Isn't that how fiction does its great work?

Dinner tonight: something mild-mannered and unelaborate, involving whatever staples happen to be on the canning shelf or in the cupboard, the snowy garden, or the freezer. P.S. Stay tuned for an upcoming pierogi project.