William Blake retired at times to mental institutions to paint his lovely portraits. This was back at the start of the Industrial Revolution and Blake was having none of it. He was known for taking too long and going too slowly at his main job, being an engraver.
At around the same time, on the other side of the Atlantic, was Benjamin Franklin, who advocated industry, to always be engaged in useful and productive activities. He did not recommend, for example, lying in bed all day long. He advised shoemakers to be up at the crack of dawn, and even if they had no orders yet for the day, he bade them to begin striking their irons, so that passersby would hear the clank-clank-clank reverberating from his household, and say to themselves that here at least lives an industrious chap, now what’s he making…ah, shoes then? Why, to be up so early he must be in demand, and therefore skilled, and come to think on it, these loafers are coming undone at the seams. Think I’ll stop in next time around.
Benjamin Franklin said that this shoemaker would profit more by such activity than by, for example, slugging whiskey down at the docks and trying to get his hands into a young lady’s petticoats.
And whose mug, I ask ye ladies and gentlemen, do we now see emblazoned on the American hundred dollar bill?
Yet, we at the Slow Human feel that William Blake would have been a better choice.