My sabbatical: a more-or-less halftime report

Arthur Melville, Winter, Duddingston Loch, c. 1885

(I’m obsessed with this watercolor by Arthur Melville, one of the “Glasgow Boys.” It’s in the exhibition I talked about in my previous post. One can pick it up for a mere $40,000. Duddingston Loch is in Edinburgh, just south of Arthur’s Seat, yet I’ve never been there. Obviously I’ll remedy that oversight the next time I’m in town.)

I needed to get two main things done during my sabbatical: finishing an edited volume on Augustine’s Confessions and writing a book on Scotus’s ethics. The edited volume is at the press (see this post for the table of contents). I have various odds and ends of reviewing to do, and then—surely no later than St David’s Day—I can turn to the book. Six months is not long enough for me to write a book from scratch, but I’m not writing this from scratch. A fair bit of it already exists in the form of draft chapters and conference papers. I’ve translated all the relevant material into English. So six months seems reasonable.

My focus and concentration have been greatly helped by renewed attention to my health: physical, emotional, and spiritual. I’m continuing my workouts, twice a week with my trainer and once a week on my own. Little by little I’m lifting heavier weights, and my energy is noticeably improved. I was a bit dispirited yesterday when I stepped on the scale for the first time in a few weeks and discovered that I had lost five pounds. I’m almost back down to 11 stone; my goal is to get to 12 stone by the end of the year. (12 stone is a nice round number. “168 pounds” doesn’t have the same ring to it.) But all the muscles I worked out yesterday are super-sore today, which is a good sign. (I just had to go downstairs to encourage Tess to stop barking at the pool guy, my glutes protesting vigorously with every step thanks to yesterday’s Bulgarian split squats.) I’m also taking care to get lots of protein, and I’m feeling confident that I’m doing everything I need to in order to get the results I’m hoping for. My esophagus poses a bit of a challenge: getting 2250 calories a day in me, which is what I need just to maintain my weight (let alone increase it), requires a lot of effort and patience.

That’s physical health. For emotional health I’m trying what I think of as my “daily essentials”: journaling, playing the piano, and reading something enjoyable. The journaling is mostly just for me, but I’ll probably be blogging more as well. I just spent some time working on the Courante from the E-major French Suite, trying to get the fingering down. I already have two of the other movements in pretty good shape. I’m hoping to have the whole thing up to performance standard by Pentecost.

Not this performance standard, obviously. I heard Angela Hewitt play the whole Well-Tempered Clavier in (do I even need to say this?) Edinburgh during the Festival.

As for spiritual health, “Welcome deare feast of Lent” (Herbert). I decided to spend this Lent with the Caroline Divines. I have daily readings from Jeremy Taylor along with the Private Prayers of William Laud and six sermons for Lent by Lancelot Andrewes. I also often use Andrewes’s Private Prayers when I pray the Office using the Venite app.

I am struck by how often Bishop Andrewes has me thanking God for not killing me yet. And this morning’s reading from Bishop Taylor also happened to be about death. Taylor is always bracing, but this passage was especially powerful. Oddly, it’s somewhat difficult for me to take the prospect of death anywhere nearly as seriously as Andrewes and Taylor would have me do. Given that I came very close indeed to dying about three weeks after my forty-ninth birthday, you’d think I would be “deeply sensible of the shortness and uncertainty of life” (BCP 489). But yeah, not so much. It’s probably good to have Bishop Taylor reminding me with his characteristic force and directness.