I once wrote a post about King Alfred’s translations, and I have been thinking about it again. Not because I have changed my mind, but because I now stand closer to the thing I was describing.

Alfred began his translations in middle age; when I wrote about him I was younger. The admiration I felt then was real but partly abstract: the idea of a man turning to difficult texts late in life, not for advancement but from need. I understood the principle. I did not yet feel the urgency.

Sixteen years later I find myself at the beginning of an eighteen-month reading plan: Pessoa, Weil, Burton, Montaigne, Woolf, Plutarch running underneath like a bass line. Hundreds of unread books on the shelves. The impulse Alfred followed, the conviction that certain texts must be brought near, that reading is not ornament. I recognise it now from the inside.

“Inwardness recognised as a shared condition.” I still believe that, perhaps more so. The books I am drawn to, the digressive, the essayistic, the formally restless, are not solitary pleasures, though they are often read alone. Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet is fragments written by a man who barely existed in public life. It withholds nothing. It offers a whole undefended interior.

Alfred chose Gregory and Boethius and Bede. I have chosen Leopardi’s Zibaldone and Chateaubriand’s Memoirs and Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy. The scale is different; the need is the same. These are books shaped by loss and counsel, and I have placed them in a sequence because I believe they require one another’s company. A reading plan is a small act of governance over one’s own attention, which is the only territory most of us are given to tend.

The questions I asked in 2010 still stand. Which texts are made near in our time? To whom are they made near? I am less confident now that the answers are encouraging. But the labour itself, the commitment to reading things longer and stranger than anyone requires you to read, has not lost its meaning. The older I get, the more I understand Alfred’s choice not as an intellectual programme but as a discipline of attention. You learn Latin at fifty because the texts exist and your people cannot reach them and the work will not do itself.

I do not know who my people are in this analogy. Perhaps only myself.