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Essays of Elia, 1823
Thirty-three years a clerk at the East India House, who wrote essays on his evenings as Elia and looked after his sister all his life. Lawyers, I suppose, were children once.
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Kept by Substance · the quoted lines are theirs, the rest written after them · Essays of Elia
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The week’s question
Have you kept some old truth because showing it would make the confusion worse?
I ask this for those who see too much and fear the unity of sorrow.
“what associating league to the imagination can there be between the seers, and the seers not, of a presential miracle?”
“I was born, and passed the first seven years of my life, in the Temple.”
I mean that a man is cut from the cloth of his earliest hours, before reason has time to stitch him into something else. When I was but seven, the great river was only a stream that watered our pleasant places, and the stone walls were not cold law but warm shelter. I did not know then that those halls would one day hold the ghosts of dead judges or…
“I am by nature extremely susceptible of street affronts; the jeers and taunts of the populace; the low-bred triumph they display over the casual trip, or splashed stocking, of a gentleman.”
I used to be so quick to take offence at any stumble or splash that my own pride felt like a sore foot. Yet seeing that young fellow with his soot-stained face and red eyes, laughing without malice, made…
“But only STELLA’S eyes, and STELLA’S heart.”
I have watched my sister Mary stir a pot of broth with such steady hands that the steam rises in straight lines to meet the ceiling. When I was a boy, I thought ambition was a ladder made of oak and iron, something one could climb if only one had the strength. Now I see it is merely a fever in the blood, a burning that makes the eyes blind…
“Poor lay-man I, for sacred rites unfit.”
I once tried to teach my sister Mary how to keep accounts with a book she could not read, speaking of numbers as if they were stars. She looked at me with such quiet pity that I felt the floor drop away beneath my feet, leaving only the cold stone of my own ignorance.
“Farewell with him all that made sickness pompous.”
“A thing was worth buying then, when we felt the money that we paid for it.”