“Well, let it pass; April is over, April is over. There are all kinds of love in the world, but never the same love twice.”
– F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Short Stories
« [T]he breathless haste with which they [Americans] work – the distinctive vice of the New World – is already beginning to infect Old Europe with its ferocity and is spreading over it a strange lack of intellectuality. One is now ashamed of rest: even long reflection almost causes remorse of conscience. Thinking is done with a stop-watch, as dining is done with the eyes fixed on the […] newspaper; one lives as one might always “miss out on something”. “Better do anything than nothing”: this principle also is a noose with which all culture and all higher taste may be strangled. […]
One has no longer either time or energy for ceremonies, for roundabout courtesies, for any esprit in conversation, or for any otium whatever. […] If there be still enjoyment in society and in art, it is enjoyment such as over-worked slaves provide for themselves. Oh, this moderation in “joy” of our cultured and uncultured classes! Oh, this increasing suspiciousness of all enjoyment! Work is winning over more and more the good conscience to its side: the desire for enjoyment already calls itself “need of recreation,” and even begins to be ashamed of itself. […] Indeed, it might soon go so far that one could not yield to the desire for the vita contemplative (that is to say, excursions with thoughts and friends), without self contempt and a bad conscience. »
— Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (1882)
