In retirement we downsize, a ruthless and melancholy surgery. We’ve spent our lives accumulating – possessions, relationships, notions – and now have no more space – in our rooms, calendars, minds. We must abandon, bequeath, discard – say goodbye to – much we’ve cherished, but we try not to complain. Few sounds as repugnant as an old person groaning. (“Pipe down, Gramps, you’re lucky to have lived so long.”)

Since boyhood I was avid for more – possessions, relationships, notions. Oh to be a plutocrat, polymath, sage! My ambition was restless, preposterous. I did my best to hide it, especially from myself. Why couldn’t I be glad with what I had!

These days I’m avid for less. Getting, tending, and stowing take time and mine is running out. What remains I mean to devote to what matters most. How will I know what matters most? Our souls tell us if we listen hard.

Since literature has been my passion, parting with old flames wounds. I do not read books but authors. Falling in love I crave ever deeper intimacy. I can’t get enough of, say, Shakespeare, Montaigne, Thoreau, Henry James… my list is lengthy but not endless. George Eliot, I’d have said, was established there until lights out. But then, to my horror, I gave up on her, abandoning voluminous Daniel Deronda two-thirds through my third reading. Her writing now struck me as clunky, labored, her characters concocted, her plot improbable. I blush even to confess this breakup. Had I changed – or she – or was the ruthless clock to blame? “Sorry, Ma’am, gotta book.”

For four years I’ve been rereading the Victorian novel, sluicing its enormities into my skull to see what I might make of them. For a slow reader, almost any Victorian novel is a daunting commitment. They’re long for the same reason today’s TV series and streamed movies never end: time flies in their embrace. David Copperfield unfolded in monthly installments over a year and a half: that’s a lot of sweet distraction from one’s mundane woes.

I claim to have been rereading but that’s misleading. Is listening reading? Among modern wonders is the availability of vast libraries through earpieces for pennies. The Victorian novel makes for grand listening, with its recognizable characters, vivid plots, moral urgency, and amiable prose neither too opaque nor ornate. They were made to be enjoyed by anybody who could read, not just hifalutin highbrows. Literary fiction after the nineteenth century grew more taxing and less accessible. You need a Ph. D. and half a dozen languages to bushwhack your way through Finnegans Wake. Is Joyce’s modernist word-mountain a masterpiece or joke? I’ll never know – life is too short. For sure it cannot be enjoyed on a casual stroll.

To claim it’s “the Victorian novel” I’ve been rereading is likewise misleading. I’ve been spending my time with two novelists only – Dickens and Trollope – and, for a single title, Thackeray. What about Bulwer-Lytton, Disraeli, Charles Kingsley, Wilkie Collins, the Bronte sisters, Elizabeth Gaskell, poor forsaken George Eliot, and other stars of their hour? What about the novels composed in verse by Browning, Tennyson? Is such exclusion fair? Can one generalize from so skimpy a sample?

It’s not fair. Downsizing isn’t. As space and time shrink, we must banish much we loved. My time is short. How short I can’t predict – no ominous ticking yet, but way too short for all I crave. Dickens and Trollope I can’t quit. (Neither Lewis Caroll nor Arthur Conan Doyle, but they’re oddities, one-offs, hardly novelists.)

What about these two nineteenth-century heartthrobs nourishes my twenty-first century soul? The mystery of love.