Perhaps it's a good time to reconsider pleasure at its roots. Changing out of wet shoes and socks, for instance.

In the metropolitan haunts of the highly sophisticated, the cocktail is no longer an instrument of friendship but a competitive fashion statement, or one-upmanship.

In the taverns all was amiable and easy, but the coffeehouses were cauldrons of edgy malcontents.

Success in war was the only success that counted; failure was a disgrace to be wiped out only by starting another war and winning it.

The only people who still read poetry are poets, and they mostly read their own.

Poets and songwriters speak highly of spring as one of the great joys of life in the temperate zone, but in the real world most of spring is disappointing. We looked forward to it too long, and the spring we had in mind in February was warmer and dryer than the actual spring when it finally arrives. We'd expected it to be a whole season, like winter, instead of a handful of separate moments and single afternoons.

In civilized places idleness, once the prerequisite for abstract thought, poetry, religion, philosophy, and falling in love, has become a character flaw. In America we've managed to stamp it out almost completely, and few people under forty can remember a single moment of it, even in earliest childhood. The phrase 'spare time' has vanished from the land.