I admit that his business is very exhausting and exigent. For the sake
of argument I will grant that he cannot safely give it an instant's
less time than he is now giving it. But even so his business does not
absorb at the outside more than seventy hours of the hundred and ten
hours during which he is wide awake each week. The rest of the time he
spends either in performing necessary acts in a tedious way or in
performing acts which are not only tedious to him, but utterly
unnecessary (for his own hypothesis is that he gets no pleasure out of
life)--visiting, dinner-giving, cards, newspaper-reading, placid
domestic evenings, evenings out, bar-lounging, sitting aimlessly
around, dandifying himself, week-ending, theatres, classical concerts,
literature, suburban train-travelling, staying up late, being in the
swim, even golf. In whatever manner he is whittling away his leisure,
it is the wrong manner, for the sole reason that it bores him.
Moreover, all whittling of leisure is a mistake. Leisure, like work,
should be organized, and it should be organized in large pieces.
The proper course clearly is to substitute acts which promise to be
interesting for acts which have proved themselves to produce nothing
but tedium, and to carry out the change with brains, in a business
spirit. And the first essential is to recognize that something has
definitely to go by the board.
He protests:
"But I do only the usual things--what everybody else does! And then
it's time to go to bed."
The case, however, is his case, not everybody else's case. Why should
he submit to everlasting boredom for the mere sake of acting like
everybody else?
He continues in the same strain:
"But you are asking me to change my whole life--at my age!"
Nothing of the sort! I am only suggesting that he should begin to
live.
And then finally he cries:
"It's too drastic. I haven't the pluck!"
Now we are coming to the real point.
IV
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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