joft
1 Jan 2005, 08:03 AM
The Idler's Companion
An Anthology of Lazy Literature
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0880015497/qid=1104566096/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/102-4662609-0537752?v=glance&s=books
From the back cover: "The most bewildering thing about man is his idea of work and the amount of work he imposes upon himself, or civilization has imposed upon him. All nature loafs, while man alone works for a living. He works because he has to, because with the progress of civilization life gets incredibly more complex, with duties, responsibilities, fears, inhibitions and ambitions, born not of nature, but of human society." - Lin Yutang
This book is awesome, it has everything from ancient Persian poems about drinking ("I drink so much wine, its aroma / Will rise from the dust when I'm under it; / Should a toper come upon my dust, / The fragrance from my corpse will make him roaring drunk.") to Thoreau to Aristotle to Robert Louis Stevenson. I haven't read that much of it, but I love it. It captures perfectly the style of doing nothing at all.
An Anthology of Lazy Literature
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0880015497/qid=1104566096/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/102-4662609-0537752?v=glance&s=books
From the back cover: "The most bewildering thing about man is his idea of work and the amount of work he imposes upon himself, or civilization has imposed upon him. All nature loafs, while man alone works for a living. He works because he has to, because with the progress of civilization life gets incredibly more complex, with duties, responsibilities, fears, inhibitions and ambitions, born not of nature, but of human society." - Lin Yutang
This book is awesome, it has everything from ancient Persian poems about drinking ("I drink so much wine, its aroma / Will rise from the dust when I'm under it; / Should a toper come upon my dust, / The fragrance from my corpse will make him roaring drunk.") to Thoreau to Aristotle to Robert Louis Stevenson. I haven't read that much of it, but I love it. It captures perfectly the style of doing nothing at all.