The Love of My Life

Ahhhhhh, thanks to one of my favorite new bloggers (new to me, that is), Simple Life In France. She asked about the Thomas Browne passage I posted. That's when it occurred to me that maybe it was OT to include a passage from a seventeenth-century doctor, and great prose stylist, and quirky thinker in a blog that is purportedly about frugality.

What can I say? Reading--especially literature of the 16th and 17th centuries--is the love of my life. As it happens, it is also a frugal love, since books aren't all that expensive to begin with (thanks to Aldus Manutius for inventing the pocket-sized book back in the day). Plus there's always the library.

Every Frugality 101 writer exhorts: Use the library! You will save $xxxx/year. In truth, however, that doesn't do too much if you don't like what the library offers.

While other avocations are frugal in themselves--sewing, cooking, gardening come to mind--others are intrinsically expensive, like sailing and anything to do with horses. It's much harder to stick to the frugal path if your loves are intrinsically expensive.

On our drive to school today, Mr. FS and I listened to the unabridged recording of Swann's Way. Proust, incidentally, is probably the love of Mr. FS's life and he's read ALL of them, numerous times, in French as well as in translation. Rather fortuitously, the part we heard concerned Swann's efforts to interest Odette in the arts. Though she claimed to be interested, her response often involved the glassy-eyed boredom I sometimes see when I try to teach my admittedly arcane true loves.

The audiobook was from the library, by the way, which ordered it at Mr. FS's request.

I've written before about how lucky I am that the love of my life--in all senses--just happens to be frugal.

Because Sir Thomas Browne, who is the originator of the phrase "lie down in darkenss," died many a year ago, his works are long out of copyright, and are available all over the internet, free of charge.

What is the love of your life? Is it a frugal one?