TPPM (9): Poor Richard and Benjamin Franklin

[Tim Strzechowski]

"Poor Richard was not shy in expressing his distaste for Sloth. When he was not merely repeating well-known British proverbs on the subject, he was contributing Great Awakening- style outbursts of his own -- "O Lazy-bones ! Dost think God would have given thee arms and legs if he had not designed thou shouldst use them?" Beneath the rubato of the day abided a stern pulse beating on, ineluctable, unforgiving, whereby whatever was evaded or put off now had to be made up for later, and at a higher level of intensity. "You may delay, but time will not." [...]


http://pages.prodigy.net/jmiller.cb/prs10.html

http://www.sacklunch.net/poorrichard/

http://www.ushistory.org/franklin/facts/


[...] "In the idea of time that had begun to rule city life in Poor Richard's day, where every second was of equal length and irrevocable, not much in the course of its flow could have been called nonlinear, unless you counted the ungovernable warp of dreams, for which Poor Richard had scant use. [...]  During the Poor Richard years, Franklin, according to the Autobiography, was allowing himself from l A.M. to 5 A.M. for sleep. The other major nonwork block of time was four hours, 9 P.M. to 1 A.M., devoted to the Evening Question, "What good have I done this day?" This must have been the schedule's only occasion for drifting into reverie -- there would seem to have been no other room for speculations, dreams, fantasies, fiction. Life in that orthogonal machine was supposed to be nonfiction."

http://eserver.org/books/franklin/

http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/b/benjaminfr151628.html
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