The Decline of Pleasure (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from The Decline of Pleasure It will take something more than a paragraph to make the point properly clear. And clarity will come hard unless we can first clear away a certain underbrush of assumptions, cer tain habits of thought that conceal from us the true contours of our prison and hold us immobile, though fretting, inside it. Something of our frustration may stem from continuing to believe what is no longer quite so, or perhaps never was; casual beliefs casually acted upon may be pushing us further in the direction of our dismay. I should like to begin, a bit deviously and in a fashion that may at first sight seem irrelevant, by raising a few questions about the shape of our days, by examining a few commonplace assumptions that may quietly have turned into ironies. To do so, it will be necessary to speak briefly of matters personal and domestic. It is in the privacy of our passing from kitchen to bedroom, and from the party to the car, that we are now most conscious of a fundamental unease. We can distract ourselves while we are publicly occupied; the sense of going nowhere overtakes us precisely when we are going home. My own observations on matters personal and domestic cannot, of course, be offered as though they constituted any sort of statistical proof; but it is always possible that what has surprised me has also surprised someone else and that together we may make a statistic. It is not, in any case, statistics we are after; we are after some reassurance that we are not statistics. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.