David Hamilton
- 1972
Fellowship Title:
- Leisure Time and Middle Class America
Fellowship Year:
- 1972
The City Mouse and the Country Mouse — with apologies
“This place is full of willing people — some willing to work and the rest willing to let them.” — counter sign in a Manhattan Hamburger Haven Joel Horowitz, City Mouse, glues himself to the window of Katz’s Delicatessen and waits out the rain. He is out on a Wednesday to check his routes, and, unless an all-day downpour is forecast or he has switched to night cycle, he is out today. Nine-thirty breakfast, on the street by 10; up Fifth Avenue to Central Park and back down Second to 21st Street by five, in time for three hours of basketball. Home by 9:30, dinner, maybe TV or the radio, a newspaper; to bed at 1 AM. The City Mouse is getting about as close to being a cipher as he can get: Most of the statisticians have lost him. He used to work, but now he doesn’t. He used to get workman’s compensation, but now he doesn’t. If one institution of higher learning lists him as a college dropout, three do (and that would make
“Life Without Wine is No Life at All”
April 21, 1972 New York Grappling in the semantic murk: “Leisure”, the word, is a hard one to handle. What does it mean? Ask around. “Spare time,” one says, or “the time when you’re not at work.” A third cautions that work, a job, an occupation, is implicit in the term. Man cannot have leisure without having come from a job. Curious work, asking after the meanings of word-symbols without the aid of a standard dictionary, but interesting work, and important sometimes, for the language breathes and grows as a living being and those whose labor it is to chronicle it can be found lagging, sometimes. Webster, one such, has “leisure” as “freedom or spare time provided by the cessation of activities” or “a period of unemployed time.” Also: “apparent effortlessness” or “calm deliberation” and as “opportunity provided by free time” or the “duration of such activity.” The Oxford English Dictionary, tracing from the Fourteenth Century, lists “freedom or opportunity to do something specified or implied” and “opportunity afforded by freedom from occupation” and “the