Monday, April 20, 2020

Writing History While Reading History

In my last post, I mentioned my effort to regain sanity and balance by swearing off the media and replacing it with reading a rather weighty but well-written tome on the French Revolution. It has been quite successful in that regard. However, an unforeseen benefit has accrued as well.

You see this book is quite long and weighty with a big wide binding. It is hard to keep open while I am eating. So I resort to a variety of eating tactics whereby I can use my left hand to keep the book open for reading while I use the right hand for eating. This works pretty well except that I constantly tend to get little bits of food or drips or grease on my hands that inevitably get on the pages of the book.

At first, this was bothering me (desecration of books being rather a serious offense). But then I realized the social history opportunity. I typically read a few pages with each meal. That means I could logically reconstruct my entire eating history during the lockdown, just by studying the pages of my book!

I am sure this will prove to be enlightening and fascinating for future social historians.

2 comments:

Renee Michelle Goertzen said...

I have a complicated system of using extra cutlery and spare plates to weight down books that I am reading while eating. But I had not realized that by doing so, I was losing an opportunity to archive parts of my meals.

alexis said...

I have a spare book holder if you need dad! They are very handy for reading and eating.