Revise revise revise. The Waugh-Mitford exchange. Death's sting. A meditation on same.

Not carved in stone? "Constant Revision" is a book title I am considering. Shakespeare's plays were undergoing revision while performed by his troupe. Wordsworth revised until the cows came home. His poetry of a century or two ago is considered in its various versions. Sometimes we prefer an earlier version. But things written get revised all the time, even after they are in print. So why shouldn't we scribblers have that approach to what we do? Constant revision until we die.

There goes Nancy again: Evelyn Waugh and Nancy Mitford "like all writers, put entertainment first and exaggerated for effect," said Florence King, reviewing The Letters of Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh in the Wall Street Journal. She exaggerates for effect, but the point's made.

Mitford tweaked Waugh about his Catholicism, comparing the resurrection of the body to "finding your motor car after a party" and marveling at how mourners say of the departed, "'She must be in heaven now' -- as though she'd caught the 4:45." Waugh called this "a fatuous intrusion" into a world she knew nothing of. Deucedly, if damnably, clever, however.

The death question: A friend concerned about the noncommercial aspects of my blog Blithe Spirit asked if I have gotten any work from it, meaning client work, which pays more than work for publication in most cases. (You should read Ben Jonson's correspondence with his lordly patrons. "Drink to me only with thine eyes," he told Celia, but he still had to live.)

No work from it, I replied, and my friend wondered what people will say when they bury me, implying they would not say much if I'd gotten no assignments from it.

Actually, it will little affect me one way or the other at that point, which he surely realizes, but like most people insufficiently. Indeed, even if by slip of lip, it's strange to speak of point-of-death achievement in terms of work for hire. I love work for hire, but Blithe Spirit is the sort of thing you squeeze in before you die.

The night cometh, after all, when no man stirs, which I just made up. No woman either.

Now you see me, now you don't: Do not assume that I am rushing to beat a short deadline, though in the over-all scheme of things we all labor under a short one. Neither the day nor the hour has been announced to me. I await the thief in the night like the rest of you.

Still, the uncovered manhole is out there. Ditto drive-by machine-gunning by drug-crazed hippies -- the usual assortment of Sudden Happenings. Eternity lurks at every corner. Or as Hector says in Chapman's Homer, in his goodbye to his wife Andromache before the final battle, "the solid heap of night."

Well, when the solid heap of night o'ertakes me, will people bemoan my getting few or no assignments? Or will they happily recall the nonsense here displayed under guise of art and journalism, to name just two of many possible cover stories for all this?

The Shadow knows, but who else? Beside the Heavenly Ruler.