a beautiful thing to behold & something to think about, when you've perhaps lost in the periphery of your eye the beauty in life.

So, revisiting Mark Slouka's attractively nonactive essay, Quitting the Paint Factory, by Mark Slouka (Harper’s Magazine – November 2004) I can't help but labor over the thought of how well timed the visit has come.

Chiming in with Calvin Coolidge's refrain that “the chief business of the American people is business,” Slouka goes on to add:

Ah, but here’s the rub: Idleness is not just a psychological necessity, req­uisite to the construction of a complete human being; it constitutes as well a kind of political space, a space as necessary to the workings of an actual democracy as, say, a free press. How does it do this? By allowing us time to figure out who we are, and what we believe; by allowing us time to consider what is unjust, and what we might do about it. By giving the inner life (in whose precincts we are most ourselves) its due. Which is precisely what makes idle­ness dangerous. All manner of things can grow out of that fallow soil. Not for nothing did our mothers grow suspicious when we had “too much time on our hands.” They knew we might be up to something. And not for nothing did we whisper to each other, when we were up to something, “Quick, look busy.”

Today is, what?, November second. But too quick it comes, the gravity that brought the ax falling down onto autocracy comes down just as quickly on democracy.

For those that didn't vote, consider carefully what society you passively design. Design in society, like in an essay or a video clip, follows the making of each of its parts---each sentence and each frame can change the overall picture.