The Decline of Pleasure (Classic Reprint) Hardback -

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.

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