Allan Lane once said, “Don’t try. It’s bigger than both of us!”
Paying attention is, well if not important, it is something that can really … what am I saying? I was getting around to saying here that I had just now noticed that this Hermes 3000 has an elite typeface, 12 characters per inch, and the other Hermes 3000, the one with all the characters for Spanish, French, and whatever else, that one has a pica, or 10 characters per inch. I had typed on the two of them without noticing the difference. Until I decided to swap back to this machine and use it for a while. What other things do we take for granted? (note the presence of the 1 and O characters on this typewriter. I had missed them. It was one of the, no it was the reason to swap back.)
I am looking for a short story called or something like “A Parable of Laziness.” It is from John Steinbeck. It involves a man on a hot afternoon, a widowed woman, (or does it?), a rug with a rumpled corner, Oh drat. Perhaps I had written about this story from Steinbeck and if I did write about it perhaps I had included it in something I logged, written about in a blog, and…0h Wait. I did. It is in The Log from the Sea of Cortez. But wait, I had looked there, the table of contents has Introduction, log, glossary and then I quit reading there. But a search found it:
The log from the Sea of Corte, John Steinbeck
if only for .”A Parable of Laziness” which is a great telling of Bogle’s “Don’t just do something, stand there” dictum.
So back to my copy of Steinbeck’s book (of which I am too lazy to type out) and yes, there it is because had I read on earlier and noted “index” in the table of contents I could have jumped to the back of the book and found “laziness, 185-6” and gone to the pages and enjoyed reading it again. No widow in the telling, the woman is Helen C. Of which the tale ends with “He is happy; Helen C. may be happy; and the rug is not disturbed at all.” The rug is crooked. Does it care? Why should the man impose his need for “I am, in effect, trying to impose my will, my insular sense of rightness, on a rug…” Now all of this is getting to an observation from Soren Kierkegaard, “Of all ridiculous things the most ridiculous seems to me, to be busy.” Ah yes, why are we busy? Imposing our wills on the world around us. Are we making it better?
— MichaelRpdx (boy, now that is a first draft, to be rewritten!)