I have thought many times that the worst thing in the world for me is to get up in the morning and think, “There’s nothing that I absolutely have to do today; I get to set my own schedule.” At the end of the day I almost certainly will not have accomplished many, if indeed any, of the tasks on my to-do list. I will have started out the day with good intentions, but I won’t have lived up to them.
Back in the summer of 1986 I had what I guess would be called a sabbatical. . . .