Tuesday, March 22, 2005

The File: Ease

To enjoy ease, it is surely necessary to labor. To enjoy luxury, it is necessary to live hard. Since our work in these after-days is all too often sedentary, since we all too often tend to overfeed, and since we shun living hard, if we have not lost the capacity for it, it is small wonder that we are dyspeptically out of tune with life, and have to pay to have our jaded appetites whetted by manufactured thrills on stage, screen, dirt-track, or playing field.
-- Sidney Rogerson, Twelve Days, as excerpted in John Keegan's The Book of War: 25 Centuries of Great War Writing, pp. 271

Rogerson was writing of his experiences as a British officer serving in the trenches of World War I. 89 years later, citizens of the developed world are even further cocooned by technology, and our "manufactured thrills" are ever more complex. I doubt they are any more satisfying. You can try to distract yourself from your hunger for life, but when the entertainment is over the hunger is still there. So people fall asleep with the television on, whispering to them as they dream....

12:09:31 AM    comment []