"Wolfgang" wrote ...

"Daniel-San" wrote ...

Thanks for the pleasant read. Yesterday (and it seems today) in the
Chicago area, we were treated to an amazing day, weather-wise. High 60s,
mild breeze, lots of rejuvenating sun. Just what a boy needs after
Wisconsin's trout season has ended....a day *perfect* for fishing. So, as
the jones built, I saw this posted. Not a total assuaging of said jones,
but close.

Well, you're in good company, anyway:

"The man's true life, for which he consents to live, lies altogether in
the field of fancy. The clergyman, in his spare hours, may be winning
battles, the farmer sailing ships, the banker reaping triumph in the arts:
all leading another life, plying another trade from that they chose....For
no man lives in the external truth, among salts and acids, but in the
warm, phantasmagoric chamber of his brain, with the painted windows and
storied walls."--R.L. Stevenson

Quoted in, "Exuberance: The Passion For Life" by Kay Redfield Jamison,
Alfred A. Knopf, 2004, p. 86.

"Snoopy, " Jamison goes on to say, "dining by candlelight on the top of
his doghouse, with his stained-glass window and van Gogh below, would
agree."

Hells bells, it seems Thurber stole Mitty from Stevenson. Well, perhaps not
"stole," but the idea is certainly there. Never read much of Stevenson;
perhaps I should.

Michelle and I often discuss this very idea. She usually catches me flipping
through a well-worn copy of one of the many Calvin and Hobbes anthologies
that dot my book collection, which leads to a discussion of Mitty and the
whole idea of the internal life, separate from the external. Usually makes
for an interesting discussion...ranging from your basic daydream (which I
believe to be a "healthy" expression of simple desires) to the secret lives
some people live (not so healthy, IMO...)

Anyway... it's about 65 or so outside, and mentally, I'm a little west of
Madison, casting a little sedge over a rising trout. Physically, I'm sitting
inside my little carrel reading a surprisingly intersting union journal from
the 1920s. Great stuff.

Walter...err... Dan