"But," he resists, "you know perfectly well that I have no time!"
To which I am obliged to make reply:
"My dear sir, it is not your wife you are talking to. Kindly be honest
with me."
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.
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