This Business of Busyness

From whiskey river:

The feeling of being hurried is not usually the result of living a full life and having no time. It is on the contrary born of a vague fear that we are wasting our life. When we do not do the one thing we ought to do, we have no time for anything else — we are the busiest people in the world.

(Eric Hoffer)

Not from whiskey river:

Pray let us have no more bussiness, but busyness : the deuse take me if I know how to spell it, your wrong spelling, madam Stella, has put me out: it does not look right; let me see, bussiness, busyness, business, bisyness, bisness, bysness; faith, I know not which is right, I think the second; I believe I never writ the word in my life before ; yes, sure I must though; business, busyness, bisyness. I have perplexed myself, and can’t do it. Prithee ask Walls. Business, I fancy that’s right. Yes it is; I looked in my own pamphlet, and found it twice in ten lines, to convince you that I never writ it before. O, now I see it as plain as can be; so yours is only an s too much.

(Jonathan Swift, Dr. Swift’s Letters to Stella, Letter XXXV [source])

…and:

I know not what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding another pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

(Isaac Newton, Memoirs of Newton [source])

…and:

Spring Comes to Murray Hill

I sit in an office at 244 Madison Avenue
And say to myself You have a responsible job havenue?
Why then do you fritter away your time on this doggerel?
If you have a sore throat you can cure it by using a good goggeral,
If you have a sore foot you can get it fixed by a chiropodist,
And you can get your original sin removed by St. John
the Bopodist,
Why then should this flocculent lassitude be incurable?
Kansas City, Kansas, proves that even Kansas City needn’t always
be Missourible.
Up up my soul! This inaction is abominable.
Perhaps it is the result of disturbances abdominable.
The pilgrims settled Massachusetts in 1620 when they landed on
a stone hummock.
Maybe if they were here now they would settle my stomach.
Oh, if I only had the wings of a bird
Instead of being confined on Madison Avenue I could soar in a jiffy
to Second or Third.

(Ogden Nash [source])

Finally, Martina McBride conjures up a bird from confinement somewhere — [Edit:] according to this rather literal-minded video — not on Madison Avenue (lyrics below):

Lyrics:

Broken Wing
(performance by Martina McBride)

She loved him like he was
The last man on earth
Gave him everything she ever had
He’d break her spirit down
Then come lovin’ up on her
Give a little, then take it back

She’d tell him ’bout her dreams
He’d just shoot ’em down.
Lord, he loved to make her cry.
“You’re crazy for believin’
You’ll ever leave the ground,”
He said, “Only angels know how to fly”

Chorus:
And with a broken wing
She still sings
She keeps an eye on the sky
With a broken wing
She carries her dreams
Man you oughta see her fly

One Sunday mornin’
She didn’t go to church
He wondered why she didn’t leave
He went up to the bedroom
Found a note by the window
With the curtains blowin’ in the breeze

Chorus:
And with a broken wing
She still sings
She keeps an eye on the sky
With a broken wing
She carries her dreams
Man you oughta see her fly

With a broken wing
She carries her dreams
Man you oughta see her fly

Update, a couple hours later: About “Broken Wing”… Man, I love this song. Or rather, I guess, I love the melody, and the way McBride sings it. But honestly, the lyrics? Well, no, scratch that — actually the lyrics are pretty good too. The problem with the lyrics is that they encourage exactly the sort of easy interpretation the video’s makers succumbed to. (And sure, I do know how important that interpretation — that message — really is.)

But consider: suppose the “he” of the lyrics is an author, and the “she,” the protagonist in a story he’s trying to write. Writers often talk about the ways in which their characters seem to have minds of their own, and resist being made to do things they don’t really want to do.

I do really like the thought that the characters in a failed story — one which the author abandons, because of his characters’ resistance — that they then are liberated to fly on their own. (Perhaps to land, contented, in someone else’s work.)