Reading Materials

My current "daytime book" is another Elmore Leonard western - LAST STAND AT SABER RIVER - and it seems unusual to me, in that the characters THINK a lot. For pages and pages! By which I mean that characters - main, secondary, tertiary - will think and muse and contemplate and ruminate and reflect and remember and monologue internally for pages at a time. Maybe Elmore Leonard always does that and I just forgot. I forget things. Let's not speak of the unpleasant brain drama of some seasons ago. Speaking of which! My current blood pressure book is Herodotus. So just yesterday I read in Herodotus about the ancient Egyptian leader Amasis. See, he took this here golden foot basin and turned it into an idol, which he stuck right there in the middle of town. People didn't like him because he didn't come from an important family. So they were giving him a hard time. But they really got into this idol! They were like, "This is the best idol ever! Let's hang out with it every day!" I paraphrase. Then Amasis was like, "A-ha!" And the people were like, "What?" And, to quote the translation by Andrea L. Purvis, he "revealed that the statue had come from the foot basin into which they had previously vomited, urinated, and placed their dirty feet, but now they were worshiping it with reverence." And they were like (to go back to paraphrasing), "Oh, we get it!" So, when Amasis was done with his work day, which was pretty short, he would go out and drink with his friends, which practice came in for some criticism. And he replied (quoting the translation again), "When archers need to use their bows, they string them tightly, but when they have finished using them, they relax them. For if a bow remained tightly strung all the time, it would snap and be of no use when someone needed it. The same principle applies to the daily routine of a human being: if someone wants to work seriously all the time and not let himself ease off for his share of play, he will go insane without even knowing it, or at the least suffer a stroke." (!) Also, what a versatile foot basin!