Quote of the Day (Charles Lamb, on ‘The Only True Time’)

“I have indeed lived nominally fifty years, but deduct out of them the hours which I have lived to other people, and not to myself, and you will find me still a young fellow. For that is the only true Time, which a man can properly call his own—that which he has all to himself; the rest, though in some sense he may be said to live it, is other people's Time, not his.”—English essayist, critic, poet, and playwright Charles Lamb (1775-1834), “The Superannuated Man,” in Charles Lamb's Essays (1900)

I first encountered Charles Lamb—born 250 years ago today in London—through the children’s book Tales From Shakespeare, written with his older sister Mary. I wasn’t too impressed with it—and, consequently, him—at the time.

Then I found out that, like his friend William Hazlitt (whose picture of him accompanies this post), he was a talented practitioner of the personal essay—in a sense, the creative ancestor of bloggers like me.

Friends delighted in Lamb’s conversation, and it’s certainly the case that, with a few exceptions, what you see is what you get with him: a droll writer who liked to poke fun at himself, often using pseudonyms (including one for himself: “Elia,” taken from the last name of an Italian friend and fellow clerk).

I highlighted the quote above because, even with the vast changes in business and society that have taken place since the Romantic Era when Lamb wrote, the issues he raised in “The Superannuated Man”—working in a job that doesn’t always satisfy one’s deepest needs, and the proper use of time when employment comes to a definitive end—are ones that aging baby boomers like me are increasingly facing.

Lamb confronted these concerns himself because, family poverty forced him, at age 14, to quit school and start working as a clerk, his principal occupation until, 36 years later, he took his firm’s generous pension offer and retired.

Only a decade remained to the writer before his death. Much of that time was darkened by the growing mental instability of Mary, who had been under his care for three decades following her fit of temporary insanity that led her to fatally stab the Lambs’ mother and wound their father.

Lamb’s life underscores the predicament that so many writers who never achieve strong sales deal with: doing what you must versus what you want. We should all confront these challenges with the same perseverance, equanimity, and grace that Lamb summoned for so long.