“So you see the imagination needs
moodling—long, inefficient, happy idling, dawdling and puttering. These people
who are always briskly doing something and as busy as waltzing mice, they have
little, sharp, staccato ideas, such as: ‘I see where I can make an annual cut
of $3.47 in my meat budget.’ But they have no slow, big ideas. And the fewer
consoling, noble, shining, free, jovial, magnanimous ideas that come, the more
nervously and desperately they rush and run from office to office and up and
downstairs, thinking by action at last to make life have some warmth and
meaning…
“If good ideas do not come at once,
or for a long time, do not be troubled at all. Wait for them. Put down the
little ideas however insignificant they are. But do not feel, any more, guilty
about idleness and solitude.
“But of course I must say this:
“If your idleness is a complete
slump, that is, indecision, fretting, worry, or due to over-feeding and
physical mugginess, that is bad, terrible and utterly sterile…
“But if it is the dreamy idleness
that children have, an idleness when you walk alone for a long, long time, or
take a long, dreamy time at dressing, or lie in bed at night and thoughts come
and go, or dig in a garden, or drive a car for many hours alone, or play the
piano, or sew, or paint ALONE; or an idleness—and this is what I want you to
do—where you sit with pencil and paper or happen to be thinking, that is
creative idleness. With all my heart I tell you and reassure you: at such times
you are being slowly filled and re-charged with warm imagination, with
wonderful, living thoughts…
“…good ideas come slowly and…the
more clear, tranquil and unstimulated you are, the slower the ideas come but
the better they are.”
