Doing lines in the Land of Nod

My daily fun-facts calendar states today that Robert Louis Stevenson wrote "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" during a six-day cocaine binge.

"That an invalid in my husband's condition of health should have been able to perform the manual labour alone of putting 60,000 words on paper in six days, seems almost incredible," said his astonished wife, Fanny.

I'm not sure if this makes me have more respect for the book or the drug. I just know this wasn't the kind of thing I learned about at the writer's museum in Edinburgh, which is dedicated to Robert Burns and Sir Walter Scott as well as the "Treasure Island" author. The museum takes a historical but child-friendly approach, dedicating itself more to the passion of writing than the process.

RLS wasn't just an invalid as an adult, either. In the museum, there was a free watercolored booklet available that told the story of RLS's fever-ridden childhood, how he looked forward each evening to the arrival of the lamplighter, or "Leerie" in Scottland. The booklet is actually quite charming, but reveals itself in the last few pages to be a Christian parable, placed there by some Irish ministry group. Though this doesn't necessarily invalidate the story, I much prefer the unpurposed imaginations of RLS's "A Child's Garden of Verses."

I was going to include a verse-weed from my own weird kid's garden of verse, but I'd rather list these series of quotes from the great Scottish author, who lived from 1850-1894

• For God's sake, give me the young man who has brains enough to make a fool of himself.
• To be idle requires a strong sense of personal identity.
• All speech, written or spoken, is a dead language, until it finds a willing and prepared hearer.
• There is no progress whatever. Everything is just the same as it was thousands, and tens of thousands, of years ago. The outward form changes. The essence does not change.
• Wine is bottled poetry.
• Most of our pocket wisdom is conceived for the use of mediocre people, to discourage them from ambitious attempts, and generally console them in their mediocrity.
• There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign.
• Absences are a good influence in love and keep it bright and delicate.
• The cruelest lies are often told in silence.
• Our business in this world is not to succeed, but to continue to fail in good spirits.
• To forget oneself is to be happy.
• Everybody, sooner or later, sits down to a banquet of consequences.
• To know what you prefer, instead of humbly saying "Amen" to what the world tells you you ought to prefer, is to keep your soul alive.
• Marriage: A friendship recognized by the police
• The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean; not to affect your reader, but to affect him precisely as you wish.
• Don't judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant.
• Youth is wholly experimental