Alan Watts, What is Scholarship?

"Do you know what Scholarship means? What a school means? The original meaning of a scholar? 

Leisure. 

Scholarship is to study everything that’s unimportant. Not necessary for survival. All the charming irrelevancies of life. 

But you see the thing is this. If you don’t have a room in your life for the playful, life’s not worth living. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. But if the only reason for which Jack plays is that he can work better afterwards, he’s not really playing. He’s playing because it’s good for him. He’s not playing at all!

To be a true scholar you have to cultivate an attitude to life where you’re not trying to get anything out of it. You pick up a pebble on the beach and look at it. It’s beautiful. Don’t try to get a sermon out of it. Sermons and Stones and God and everything be damned. Just enjoy it.

Don’t feel that you’ve got to salve your conscience by saying that this is for the advancement of your aesthetic understanding. Enjoy the pebble. If you do that you’ll become healthy. You become able to be a loving helpful human being. But if you can’t do that, if you can only do things because somehow you're going to get something out of it, you’re a vulture."

Alan Watts, The Tao of Philosophy/ the Love of Wisdom Series

pub posthumously in 1995 by Alan's eldest son Mark Watts.  book is available used in paperback for around $3.00

Thanks TE!