What is The Variegated Life?

Many years ago someone told me that they feared I would never be happy—I was too romantic, expecting life to be the way it is in books. This view of who I am (or was) has troubled me since.

I started something called The Variegated Life about two decades ago on Blogger to sort out and share my thinking on the role of imagination and literature in living the good life. This newsletter is the fifth or sixth iteration of that effort (depending on what and how you count). Over the years, in addition to literature and art, I’ve written about motherhood, working at home, writing, long-distance running, and my work as a librarian. The question behind my writing here is about what makes a good life—by which I mean both a happy and an ethical one. I write because I do not know.

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Subscribe to receive every-other-weekly posts telling less about the answers and more about the search, as Virginia Woolf once described it in her journal.

Yet I have some restless searcher in me. Why is there not a discovery in life? Something one can lay hands on and say ‘This is it’? My depression is a harassed feeling. I’m looking: but that’s not it—that’s not it. What is it? And shall I die before I find it? Then (as I was walking through Russell Square last night) I see the mountains in the sky: the great clouds; and the moon which is risen over Persia; I have a great and astonishing sense of something there, which is ‘it.’ It is not exactly beauty that I mean. It is that the thing is in itself enough: satisfactory; achieved.

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