Today I begin my Milton chapter for The Conversation. It will be odd to work on Milton again after all this time and space has come between us. To be honest, I should say that a chunk of the chapter will reprint material from Tracing Paradise, but I still need to write an introduction that focuses on some of my routes into writing the memoir, and this will feel strange.

The cucumbers are beginning to pile up, and I foresee pickling in my future, but I don't know when that will happen. Today and tomorrow I have various boy obligations, and on Wednesday I'll be driving to southern Maine to teach a workshop on dramatic monologues. Who knows what monstrosities I'll find on the vines if I have to wait till Thursday?

The C. S. Lewis book I quoted from yesterday is an interesting and old-fashioned work of scholarship. I would use the word cozy if one could imagine such a term in the company of Milton the Un-Cozy. My friend Nate found a copy in a used bookstore and sent it to me long after I'd finished the memoir, so my discoveries in it are fresh. This cheers me up: I'd hate to think that all I'm doing now is recycling old material. On the other hand, this second section of The Conversation is a respite from the first. Cogitating those eight language-element chapters was an exhaustion.