THE FUSE

My grandmother, a no-nonsense woman from New England, would sometimes describe a person as “being in a brown study.” It’s an English idiom, not often used today, describing someone in serious (the “study” part of the phrase), somewhat melancholic (“brown”) thought. She was saying that the individual in question was wasting time daydreaming when they should be doing something productive. It turns out that my grandmother may have been wrong—that daydreaming might be very productive after all.