ALAN writes:

In “Greetings,” the first post at The Thinking Housewife, you wrote in regard to the claim —increasingly popular in the modern world — that home life and the family are boring.

Your assessment of such claims was entirely valid, and I was prompted to remember it when I read the following passage in Anne Gertrude Snelling’s book A Vanished World (Syracuse University Press, 1964).  She was a teacher who grew up in upstate New York. She is writing about life on farms in that region in the late 1800s and early 1900s:

“What did the folks find to talk about after farm work and household matters and neighborhood gossip had been disposed of? Wasn’t it very dull? The world, as Robert Louis Stevenson observed, is dull only to dull people. The talk on farms was not bounded by stump fences or overflowing creeks. Besides the subjects that plain people have always occupied themselves with, there happened over and again, close at hand, events so unusual and disturbing that they offered unmeasured material for a lifetime of talk and reflection, the mind returning to them as experience brought a new point of view or age suggested a new interpretation.”

                                        [A Vanished World, p. 158; emphasis added]

I have never found life or the world to be dull in the least. On the contrary, I have always thought one lifetime is not enough to explore all the things available for us to learn, and to share what we discover in conversation or writing.

Laura writes:

Thanks.

Only the interested are interesting.

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