pleasanter than any happiness until you are tired of it. That is why it
is necessary to happiness that one should be tired. Music after dinner
is pleasant: music before breakfast is so unpleasant as to be clearly
unnatural. To people who are not overworked holidays are a nuisance.
To people who are, and who can afford them, they are a troublesome
necessity. A perpetual holiday is a good working definition of hell.




The Horror of the Perpetual Holiday

It will be said here that, on the contrary, heaven is always conceived
as a perpetual holiday, and that whoever is not born to an independent
income is striving for one or longing for one because it gives holidays
for life. To which I reply, first, that heaven, as conventionally
conceived, is a place so inane, so dull, so useless, so miserable,
that nobody has ever ventured to describe a whole day in heaven, though
plenty of people have described a day at the seaside; and that the
genuine popular verdict on it is expressed in the proverb "Heaven for
holiness and Hell for company." Second, I point out that the wretched
people who have independent incomes and no useful occupation, do the
most amazingly disagreeable and dangerous things to make themselves
tired and hungry in the evening. When they are not involved in what they
call sport, they are doing aimlessly what other people have to be paid
to do: driving horses and motor cars; trying on dresses and walking up
and down to shew them off; and acting as footmen and housemaids to royal
personages. The sole and obvious cause of the notion that idleness is
delightful and that heaven is a place where there is nothing to be done,
is our school system and our industrial system. The school is a prison