A good day, or a good life?

I am currently reading The Writing Life, that little piece of freely-admitted insanity by Annie Dillard. One little morsel, along the saner lines, that I feel like reproducing is this one:

What then shall I do this morning? How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching rays. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time. A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order - willed, faked, and so brought into being; it is a peace and a haven set into the wreck of time; it is a lifeboat on which you find yourself, decades later, still living. Each day is the same, so you remember the series afterward as a blurred and powerful pattern.

...

There is no shortage of good days. It is good lives that are hard to come by. A life of good days lived in the senses is not enough. The life of sensation is the life of greed; it requires more and more. The life of the spirit requires less and less; time is ample and its passage sweet. Who would call a day spent reading a good day? But a life spent reading - that is a good life. A day that closely resembles every other day of the past ten or twenty years does not suggest itself as a good one. But who would not call Pasteur’s life a good one, or Thomas Mann’s?

Why Annie Dillard even wrote this I don’t know, because her own life was far from consistently scheduled. Perhaps that is why it became an aspiration. I am not one for schedules myself, but I read that and feel so inclined. But the other aspect of the quote that appeals is that while the doing of something in particular may not feel like a good day, it makes a good life. I had a small epiphany earlier this week in reflecting on a few weekends spent quietly in recent weeks and their tendency to render me slightly miserable. I do love to read, and would answer to anybody that time spent reading is time well spent. But when people ask me, as they constantly do, do I have anything "nice planned for the weekend"? or did I do "anything interesting" for the weekend, why do I feel like something is a little sub-standard, and under-optimised, if I am not getting out and about seeing and doing exciting things, when I am otherwise genuinely quite happy with a book? Life in Sydney certainly feels like it’s supposed to be one of sensation. In future I shall liberate myself from the appraisal of the weekend-activity-askers, and it’s subtle influence over me, and say "yes, I read". But what about a life of crochet?

I had a coffee after work today with a traveller from Germany who has been coming along to our church recently. She was telling me that in order to begin her degree in Germany in the History of Art she had to be proficient in five languages. FIVE languages!! I felt like a nincompoop. The idea of being fluent in other languages is something that really makes me covetous, perhaps owing to a love of words and language and expression ... Anyway, she went on to tell me that the first three are the hardest, the next three are easier, which was most heartening.