May 4, 2009 (yes, one more entry!)
Just read “An Apology for Idlers,” an essay by Robert Louis Stevenson. It’s great – a lot of wisdom in it… and I no longer feel so guilty for not living a “respectably-busy-busy” life (nor for escaping from the school system…)! Thank You, Lord. I believe it was in some way a gift from You today! Yay!
(Well… just wrote cover letters for 3 potential employers for Lionel… and updated his cover letters to make him more “unique” among the many applications they get… one of the applications is for Haida Gwaii… the others for Vancouver Island… Your will be done, Papa! 
A few quotes from Stevenson’s “apology”… enjoy!
Idleness so called, which does not consist in doing nothing, but in doing a great deal not recognized in the dogmatic formularies of the ruling class, has as good a right to state its position as industry itself. It is admitted that the presence of people who refuse to enter in the great handicap race for sixpenny pieces, is at once an insult and a disenchantment for those who do…. It is a sore thing to have laboured along and scaled the arduous hilltops, and when all is done find humanity indifferent to your achievement…..
A fact is not called a fact, but a piece of gossip, if it does not fall into one of your scholastic categories. An inquiry must be in some acknowledged direction, with a name to go by; or else you are not inquiring at all, only lounging; and the workhouse is too good for you. It is supposed that all knowledge is at the bottom of a well, or at the far end of a telescope. Sainte-Beuve, as he grew older, came to regard all experience as a single great book, in which to study for a few years ere we go hence; and it seemed all one to him whether you should read in chapter xx, which is the differential calculus, or in chapter xxxix, which is hearing the band play in the gardens. As a matter of fact, an intelligent person, looking out of his eyes and hearkening in his ears, with a smile on his face all the time, will get more true education than many another in a life of heroic vigils. There is certainly some chill and arid knowledge to be found upon the summits of formal and laborious science; but it is all around you, and for the trouble of looking, that you will acquire the warm and palpitating facts of life. … Many who have ‘plied their book diligently’, and know all about some one branch or another of accepted lore, come out of the study with an ancient and owl-like demeanour, and prove dry, stockish and dyspeptic in all the better and brighter parts of life. Many make a large fortune, who remain underbred and pathetically stupid to the last. And meanwhile there goes the idler, who began life along with them – by your leave, a different picture. He has had time to take care of his health and his spirits; he has been a great deal in the open air, which is the salutary of all things for both body and mind;
Extreme busyness, whether at school or college, kirk or market, is a symptom of deficient vitality; and a faculty for idleness implies a catholic appetite and a strong sense of personal identity… As if a man’s soul were not too small to begin with, [extremely busy people] have dwarfed and narrowed theirs by a life of all work and no play; until here they are at forty, with a listless attention, a mind vacant of all material of amusement, and not one thought to rub against the other, while they wait for the train….
