Samuel Clemens

For some reason lately I occasionally think of this somewhat bourgeois but valuable sentiment: "If you love what you do, you never work a day in your life." That is an introduction to the below paragraphs.

"Words realize nothing, vivify nothing to you, unless you have suffered in your own person the thing which the words try to describe. There are wise people who talk ever so knowingly and complacently about the "working classes," and satisfy themselves that a day's hard intellectual work is very much harder than a day's hard manual toil and is righteously entitled to much bigger pay. Why they really think that, you know, because they know all about the one, but haven't tried the other. But I know all about both; and so far as I am concerned, there isn't money enough in the universe, to hire me to swing a pickax thirty days but I will do the hardest kind of intellectual work for just about as near nothing as you can cipher down -- and I will be satisfied , too.

"Intellectual "work" is misnamed; it is a pleasure, a dissipation, and is its own highest reward. The poorest paid architect, engineer, general, author, sculptor, painter, lecturer, advocate, legislator, actor, preacher, singer is constructively in heaven when he is at work; and as for the musician with the fiddlebow in his hand who sits in the midst of a great orchestra with the ebbing and flowing tides of divine sound washing over him -- why certainly, he is at work, if you wish to call it that, but lord, it's a sarcasm just the same. The law of work does seem utterly unfair -- but there it is, and nothing can change it: the higher the pay in enjoyment the worker gets out of it, the higher shall be his pay in cash, also."
- From "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court"

Cate's contribution.
You may not be able to see the link if you're not on facebook. Sorry.

Don't take the above quotation necessarily as my own opinion. I don't know if the best summer of my life was spent gardening or teaching how to garden.


In addition:
Every day I am in Copenhagen makes me love this city more.

Cate is in Scandinavia with me, as the contribution should make clear.

Happy New Years. I love you all.