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

In a proper pub everyone there is potentially, if not a lifelong friend, at least someone to lure into an argument about foreign policy or the Red Sox.

Hospitality, or flinging wide the door to friends and wayfarers alike, was once important, back in a world without motels or safety nets, where a friend might find his castle burnt down or a wayfarer find bandits on his trail.

For the first time in six or seven thousand years, many people of goodwill find themselves confused about art. They want to enjoy it because enjoying art is something they expect of themselves as civilized persons, but they're unsure how to do so. They aren't even sure which of the visible objects are art and which are furniture, clothes, hors d'oeuvres, or construction rubble, and whether a pile of dead and decomposing rats is deliberate art or just another pile of decomposing rats.

Gloom we have always with us, a rank and sturdy weed, but joy requires tending.

Life, after we'd had a few millennia to observe it, turned out to be dreadfully unfair, so we invented sports.

Coaches and headmasters praise sport as a preparation for the great game of life, but this is absurd. Nothing could be more different from life. For one thing sports, unlike life, are played according to rules. Indeed, the rules are the sport: life may behave bizarrely and still be life, but if the runner circles the bases clockwise it's no longer baseball.