Idleness

Idleness, like kisses, to be sweet must be stolen. 

Jerome K. Jerome 

“Idleness—that beautiful, historically encumbered word. Beautiful because childhood is its first sanctuary and still somehow inheres in its three easy syllables—and who among us doesn’t sway toward the thought of it, often, conjuring what life might be like if it were still a play of appetites and inclinations rather than a roster of the duties and oughts that fill our calendar—indeed, make it necessary that we keep a calendar at all? ...”-from Lapham’s Quaterly, February 15,2012

This morning my ENT physician told me that the MRI of my head was normal. The deafness in my right ear is from defect of the nerve, not from a tumor and hearing aid is what I need if I want it. Good news from one perspective.

After my walk to the river and after talking with my fisherman acquaintance who had only tiny bites in his cast line yesterday and none today, I returned home, filled a glass with merlot and started my idleness listening to Dvorak’s symphony#9 in E Minor. I felt like I want to float on a lake  reading a book. 

“Why read Moby-Dick?” Nathaniel Philbrick asked this question in his book of the same title. He had very good reason; he had "read Moby Dick more than a dozen times".