Some of you have heard me say how much I have enjoyed Rosseau's Confessions. Since finishing it I've learned that there is debate about the accuracy of all his "confessions" and he did die insane, afterall. But still the guy is just cool.
You know it is interesting that he continually reminds the readers of his ineptness in conversation. He never had a ready answer and often fumbled with replies. He didn't think of himself as witty and he was always embarrased in public for his lack of social skills with regard to language. Which is just amazing given his fantastic skills at turning a beautiful phrase in writing.
Anyway, if you get a chance, Google the guy, he is very interesting. Toward the very end of the book he addresses idleness. Really what he was talking about was "tinkering." I think of idleness as being a couch potato and vegging out to the TV. But here is Jean-Jacques at approximately my chronological age now...
The idleness that I love is not that of an idler who remains with folded arms in a state of total inactivity, no more thinking than acting. That which I love is the combined idleness of a child who is incessantly in motion without ever doing anything, and that of a dotard, who wanders from one thing to another while his arms are still. I love to busy myself about trifles, to begin a hundred things and finish none, to come and go as the fancy takes me, to change my plans every moment, to follow a fly in all its movements, to try and pull up a rock to see what is underneath, to undertake with eagerness a work that would last ten years, and to abandon it without regret at the end of ten minutes--in a word, to spend the day in trifling without order or sequence, and, in everything, to follow nothing but the capirce of the moment.
Yeah. That's what I'm talking about!
Today that would earn you the reputation of a loser.
But honestly, I hear that drum beat.
You know it is interesting that he continually reminds the readers of his ineptness in conversation. He never had a ready answer and often fumbled with replies. He didn't think of himself as witty and he was always embarrased in public for his lack of social skills with regard to language. Which is just amazing given his fantastic skills at turning a beautiful phrase in writing.
Anyway, if you get a chance, Google the guy, he is very interesting. Toward the very end of the book he addresses idleness. Really what he was talking about was "tinkering." I think of idleness as being a couch potato and vegging out to the TV. But here is Jean-Jacques at approximately my chronological age now...
The idleness that I love is not that of an idler who remains with folded arms in a state of total inactivity, no more thinking than acting. That which I love is the combined idleness of a child who is incessantly in motion without ever doing anything, and that of a dotard, who wanders from one thing to another while his arms are still. I love to busy myself about trifles, to begin a hundred things and finish none, to come and go as the fancy takes me, to change my plans every moment, to follow a fly in all its movements, to try and pull up a rock to see what is underneath, to undertake with eagerness a work that would last ten years, and to abandon it without regret at the end of ten minutes--in a word, to spend the day in trifling without order or sequence, and, in everything, to follow nothing but the capirce of the moment.
Yeah. That's what I'm talking about!
Today that would earn you the reputation of a loser.
But honestly, I hear that drum beat.
I'm a fan of several different kinds of idleness because most of the people I know NEVER idle until they fall face first into their beds because they are so sleep deprived.
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