So our book-a-week project (inspired by Jen Miller’s much more successful one here) is off to a slow start, given that it’s taken us two weeks to slog through Out of Africa—though slog suggests, incorrectly, that we don’t like it, which would be a terrible lie. In fact, when we were in Utah last weekend, our friend was all disgusting and throwing up (this is about 24 hours before we were, ourselves, all disgusting and throwing up) and we read him this bit here:

Denys Finch Hatton and I went with Mr. Bulpett for a picnic to the top of Ngong Hills on his seventy-seventh birthday. As we sat up there we came to discuss the question of whether, if we were offered a pair of real wings, which could never be laid off, we would accept or decline the offer.

Old Mr. Bulpett sat and looked out over the tremendous big country below us, the green land of Ngong, and the Rift Valley to the west, as if ready to fly off over it at any moment. "I would accept," he said, "I would certainly accept. There is nothing I should like better." After a little time of thought he added: "I suppose that I should think it over, though, if I were a lady."

We would argue that ladies would enjoy wings most of all, but still: We just think that is so lovely. It was difficult, sometimes, to reconcile her views of her African neighbors—she is quite European about that, and of her time, though, we imagine, better than most. We focus on the prose, which is, as we said, just unbelievably lovely.

But moving on to matters we have a degree of control over: We are next reading Seneca’s On the Shortness of Life: Life Is Long If You Know How to Use It, part of the Penguin Books Great Ideas series.

Now that we are working in Manhattan again—officially in fashion, no less—we are thinking quite a bit about greedy, rapacious, plastic people. (Not to be too negative about it.) To speak specifically, we have been living, the past few years, as a freelance magazine writer, which pays rubbish but gives us much spare time to sit and be anxious about where our next paycheck is coming from—but spare time, we suppose, is spare time, and quite a good thing. Then we were all, let’s drive to Mongolia! And not work for two months. (Ergo, our current office paying-off-bills position.) Anyway, we miss our spare time, which we would, we hope, be filling with art projects and meaningful things (rather than watching "truTV".) Anyway, we have been thinking quite a bit about spare time, and just read this:

You will hear many people saying: "When I am fifty, I shall retire into leisure; when I am sixty I shall give up public duties." And what guarantee do you have of a longer life? Who will allow your course to proceed as you arrange it? Aren’t you ashamed to keep for yourself just the remnants of your life, and to devote to wisdom [BS addition: and crafts projects] only that time which cannot be spent on any business? How late it is to begin really to live just when life must end!

All we know is, we’re paying off our bills, and getting back to our life of craft-filled subsistence, stat. We’ll tell you this: our boss has a $1700 handbag, and if it fell in our lap, we’d keep it. (Long enough to sell it on eBay.) But as far as working 80-hour weeks to support that handbag: We do not envy her, one bit.

Above: Dior handbag, $1755

And: Out of Africa, $10.17, and On the Shortness of Life, $8.95