Okay, I’ll break with protocol and give you a heads-up about what’s happening in this rabbit hole BEFORE we get to the terminus page:

(1.) Our look back at the Garden of Allah is obviously an extension of the idea introduced by the wizard in today’s memo; namely, that idleness brings boredom and boredom is a kind of death. Study the history of the Garden of Allah and you’ll find that half its residents were disconnected celebrities determined to “celebrate” themselves into oblivion. Dorothy Parker and
F. Scott Fitzgerald were wildly talented writers famous for their self-destructive lifestyles. Sad. The other half of the Garden’s residents were highly productive creators who just needed a temporary place to live and create. (Steinbeck, Hemingway and Faulkner went on to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.) The Garden of Allah provides us with many vivid examples of the idea that focus and contentment are merely natural by-products of having chosen a purpose to which you are willing to sacrifice yourself. The farmer who is contented is the farmer who has chosen to sacrifice himself to the idea of creating food. The farmer who is miserable is the farmer who is “looking for happiness.”

(2.) Concurrently, we’ll look at some famous works of poets and songwriters as they comment on the lives of focused and unfocused people. Thirty-six years ago Hall and Oates wrote a pop song about the “unfocused, without purpose” idle-rich stereotype that would later become associated with Paris Hilton and others of her cloth…

You’re a rich girl, and you’ve gone too far
‘Cause you know it don’t matter anyway. 
You can rely on the old man’s money. 
You can rely on the old man’s money. 
It’s a bitch, girl, but it’s gone too far
‘Cause you know it don’t matter anyway.