The following is a lecture I gave at North Park, and at a few other places and in a few different forms. It studies “liberal arts” and then encourages writing. I shared some of these in a previous blog, enough wrote to me for a copy of the whole thing, so here it is.

I have a friend at a major research university who teaches on Thursday afternoons, 3-5, and when he learned my hours of teaching he asked with a snarl, “How do you get anything done?” I have another friend, a high school driver’s education teacher who never reads a book but who teaches from 7:20am to 3:30pm with a one hour break and who also coaches after school, who asks me regularly, “Is it because you can’t stand the pressure that you don’t do anything?” I have another friend, a manual laborer, whose comments to me are of this order: “How can go through life not doing anything?”

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