Isn't the quest for stillness hopeless?

All those efforts to attain slowness -- what good are they, especially when the rest of the world isn't paying attention?

Sure, you can achieve some meditative balance and create an island of serenity in yourself -- you'll also be in exile from the rest of the world. Not a good idea if you're working and trying to pay a mortgage. Keep up or else you'll fall behind, right? Isn't rest a liability? Didn't Marcus Aurelius say, "I can rest when I'm dead"? Or was that Warren Zevon?

Writers continually revisit this subject under many guises -- in biographies of spiritual figures, foodie books exhorting us to relish every taste (and thus every moment) and memoirs of personal searches like Elizabeth Gilbert's bestselling "Eat Pray Love" or Judith Shulevitz's new book, "The Sabbath World." Each of them dismantles -- easily -- the straw man argument that begins this column for a simple reason.