Are You Working: In Defense of the Invisible Labors of Creativitiy

Once, at the gym with a physicist friend, I was struck by how no one else in the room had any idea that while she was sweating on the treadmill with a blank stare into space, she was doing advanced mathematics working out the logic of black holes. Another time, on the train with a poet friend, none of the other passengers could have known that behind her faraway look she was doing the invisible la