Essays in Idleness

The great pleasure of immobility, while some consciousness remains, and until the tax department catches up with one, is that you may read, more or less without interruption. Unfortunately, some of what you read may be what you wrote yourself in the past, and this can be an embarrassment.

For one discovers that one’s longest dithering theses could have been expressed in far fewer words:

“From the impossibility of confining numbers to the constant and uniform prosecution of a common interest, arises the difficulty of securing subjects against the encroachment of governours. Power is always gradually stealing away from the many to the few, because the few are more vigilant …”

Note from the spellings, that this is from Doctor Johnson in The Adventurer.