The Blithedale Romance Re: Milton the Anarchist....

[Carl Remick]

>From: Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1 at osu.edu>
>
>Cf.  Nathaniel Hawthorne, _The Blithedale Romance_ (1852):
>
>... The clods of earth, which we so constantly belabored and turned over 
>and over, were never etherealized into thought.  Our thoughts, on the 
>contrary, were fast becoming cloddish.  Our labor symbolized nothing, and 
>left us mentally sluggish in the dusk of the evening. Intellectual activity 
>is incompatible with any large amount of bodily exercise.

Thanks for posting that, Yoshie.  It's my favorite Hawthorne passage and one 
I cited on the list long ago.  The fact that you can't think while 
exercising is perhaps the most positive thing about exercise.  Unremitting 
intellectual labor yields diminishing marginal returns no matter how bright 
the thinker -- a dynamic that explains much about the poor quality of life 
in this ever-scheming nation.

Carl

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