Of Idleness

As we see fallow ground, if it be rich and fertile, to bring forth a hundred thousand kinds of wild and useless weeds, and that to keep it in use we must subject and employ it with certain seeds for our service; and as we see that women, alone, do sometimes produce masses of shapeless flesh, whereas to cause a natural and perfect generation they must be supplied with a different kind of seed — so it is with minds. Unless you occupy them with some certain subject that will serve as a bridle to govern and contain them, they throw themselves in disorder through the vast field of imagination.

When I retired to my tower, intending to spend what remained of my life in repose and seclusion, I imagined I could not do my mind a greater favor than to let it converse entirely with itself, to settle and grow calm. But I found quite the opposite. Like a horse that has escaped the bit, my mind set off at a gallop and begat so many chimeras and fantastic monsters, one upon another, without order or purpose, that in order to contemplate their foolishness and strangeness at my leisure, I began to put them down in writing.

“The soul that has no fixed aim loses itself; to be everywhere is to be nowhere. He who does not live for some one thing does not live for anything.”

I hoped that in time, by giving these wandering thoughts a fixed form, they might become manageable. Whether they have, I leave to the reader’s judgment. What I can say is that the act of writing — of forcing a shapeless anxiety or fantasy to take on words, sentences, an argument — does something useful to it. The monster, once named, is smaller than the monster still lurking in the dark.

There is, besides, something to be said for idleness as a diagnostic tool. The mind left unoccupied will go to the places it most fears and most desires. What mine went to, in those first months of retirement, told me more about myself than years of careful introspection had done. The weeds that spring up in fallow ground tell you what that ground is made of.