The art of the wasted day

Summary: "A meditation on the value of daydreaming and ease, and the primacy of the imagination, by one of our finest prose stylists Modern life only seems to become increasingly hectic and stressful, as we try to cram more and more into each day. In her new book, acclaimed author Patricia Hampl argues for the necessity of daydreaming and leisure in our over-amped lives. Written out of a lifelong fascination with contemplation, solitude, and silence, The Art of the Wasted Day takes the form of a narrative travelogue. Hampl brings the reader on a journey around the world as she visits the homes of several exemplars of leisure from the past, who made repose and seclusion their goal, indeed their art form. She braids her own life stories into these pilgrimages: lazing her days away as a young girl, daydreaming under a beechnut tree; undertaking a retreat at a Benedictine monastery; floating down the Mississippi River in an old cabin cruiser boat, a "sheer, dreamy waste of time" that was the greatest travel experience of her life. Hampl's book is also about someone who wanted to live "the life of the mind," the idea of one's thoughts being a life"--