hat anyone is genuinely and sensibly
occupied in any one of these ways, and does his or her fair share of the
world's work: who is to say how such workers are to spend their margin of
time? There are obviously certain people who are mere drones in the
hive--rich, idle, extravagant people: we will admit that they are wasters.
But I don't admit for a moment that all the time spent in enjoying oneself
is wasted, and I think that people have a right to choose what they do
enjoy. I am inclined to believe that we are here to live, and that work is
only a part of our material limitations. A great deal of the usefulness of
work is not its intrinsic value, but its value to ourselves. It isn't only
what we perform that matters; it is the fact that work forces us into
relations with other people, which I take to be the experience we all need.
In the old dreary books of my childhood, the elders were always hounding
the young people into doing something useful--useful reading, useful
sewing, and so forth. But I am inclined to believe that sociability and
talk are more useful than reading, and that solitary musing and dreaming
and looking about are useful too. All activity is useful, all interchange,
all perception. What isn't useful is anything which hides life from you,
any habit that drugs you into inactivity and idleness, anything which makes
you believe that life is romantic and sentimental and fatuous. I wouldn't
even go so far as to say that _all_ the time spent in squabbling and
quarrelling is useless, because it brings you up against people who think
differently from yourself. That becomes wasteful the moment it leaves you
with the impotent desire to hurt your adversary. No, I am inclined to think
that the only thing which is wasteful is anything which suspends interest
and animation and the love of life; and I don't blame idle and extravagant
people who live with zest and liveliness for doing that. I only blame them
for not seeing that their extravagance is keeping people at the other end
of the scale in drudgery and dulness. Of course the difficulty of it is,
that if we offered the lowest stratum of workers a great increase of
leisure, they would largely misuse it; and that is why I believe that in
the future a large part of the education of workers will be devoted to
teaching them how to employ their leisure agreeably and not noxiously. And
I believe that there are thousands of cases in the world which are
infinitely worse t