Dang! I should unsquirrel to myself a bit more often. Here I was, on the last day of 2013, writing about flanerie:

How could it be that this word, this idea, this approach to life has passed me by all these years?!… it’s a flâneur’s life for me.

And yet, all along, squirreled away, hidden, I had this nugget from printed publication unknown, from the German Marxist commentator Walter Benjamin (from The Arcades Project):

Basic to flanerie, among other things, is the idea that the fruits of idleness are more precious than the fruits of labour.

Amidst the existential angst of modern  life, in the tumult of constant change and learning, a pause for thought, an embrace of emptiness, of no agenda, has never been more valuable.

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