“There is no snare more dangerous to busy and excursive minds than the cobwebs of petty inquisitiveness, which entangle them in trivial employments and minute studies, and detain them in a middle state, between the tediousness of total inactivity and the fatigue of laborious efforts, enchant them at once with ease and novelty, and vitiate them with the luxury of learning. The necessity of doing something and the fear of undertaking much sink the historian to a genealogist, the philosopher to a journalist of the weather, and the mathematician to a constructor of dials.”
– Johnson: Rambler #103 (March 12, 1751)
[Originally transmitted by e-mail August 14, 2002]