A master fox speaks of idleness

[sawyl]

Following on from my recent realisation about application versus focus, I find, as ever, that Montaigne has gone before me:

As we see some grounds that have long lain idle and untilled, when grown rich and fertile by rest, to abound with and spend their virtue in the product of innumerable sorts of weeds and wild herbs that are unprofitable, and that to make them perform their true office, we are to cultivate and prepare them for such seeds as are proper for our service; and as we see women that, without knowledge of man, do sometimes of themselves bring forth inanimate and formless lumps of flesh, but that to cause a natural and perfect generation they are to be husbanded with another kind of seed: even so it is with minds, which if not applied to some certain study that may fix and restrain them, run into a thousand extravagances, eternally roving here and there in the vague expanse of the imagination—

              "Sicut aqua tremulum labris ubi lumen ahenis,
               Sole repercussum, aut radiantis imagine lunae,
               Omnia pervolitat late loca; jamque sub auras
               Erigitur, summique ferit laquearia tecti."

     ["As when in brazen vats of water the trembling beams of light,
     reflected from the sun, or from the image of the radiant moon,
     swiftly float over every place around, and now are darted up on
     high, and strike the ceilings of the upmost roof."—
     AEneid, viii. 22.]

—in which wild agitation there is no folly, nor idle fancy they do not light upon:—

                    "Velut aegri somnia, vanae
               Finguntur species."

     ["As a sick man's dreams, creating vain phantasms."—
     Hor., De Arte Poetica, 7.]

The soul that has no established aim loses itself, for, as it is said—

          "Quisquis ubique habitat, Maxime, nusquam habitat."

     ["He who lives everywhere, lives nowhere."—Martial, vii.  73.]

(I note that in Michael Screech's more modern translation he prefers the word semen to seed and includes a footnote on the quite peculiar 16th century idea of reproduction to which Montaigne alludes, giving the opening paragraph a wonderfully screwball feel).