Leisure and idleness. – There is something of the American Indian, something of the savagery peculiar to the Indian blood, in the way the Americans strive for gold; and their breathless haste in working – the true vice of the new world – is already starting to spread to old Europe, making it savage and covering it with a most odd mindlessness. Already one is ashamed of keeping still; long reflection almost gives people a bad conscience. One thinks with a watch in hand, as one eats lunch with an eye on the financial pages – one lives like someone who might always ‘miss out on something’. ‘Rather do anything than nothing’ – even this principle is a cord to strangle all culture and all higher taste. Just as all forms are visibly being destroyed by the haste of the workers, so, too, is the feeling for form itself, the ear and eye for the melody of movements. The proof of this lies in the crude obviousness which is universally demanded in all situations in which people want for once to be honest with others – in their relations with friends, women, relatives, children, teachers, students, leaders, and princes: one no longer has time and energy for ceremony, for civility with detours, for esprit in conversation, and in general for any otium.20 For life in a hunt for profit constantly forces people to expend their spirit to the point of exhaustion in continual pretence or out-smarting or forestalling others: the true virtue today is doing something in less time than someone else. And thus hours in which honesty is allowed are rare; during them, however, one is tired and wants not only to ‘let oneself go’ but also to lay oneself down and stretch oneself out unceremoniously to one’s full length and breadth. This is the way people now write letters, the style and spirit of which will always be the true ‘sign of the times’. If sociability and the arts still offer any delight, it is the kind of delight that overworked slaves make for themselves. How frugal our educated and uneducated have become concerning ‘joy’! How they are becoming increasingly suspicious of all joy! More and more, work gets all good conscience on its side; the desire for joy already calls itself a ‘need to recuperate’ and is starting to be ashamed of itself. ‘One owes it to one’s health’ – that is what one says when caught on an excursion in the countryside. Soon we may well reach the point where one can’t give in to the desire for a vita contemplativa21 (that is, taking a walk with ideas and friends) without self-contempt and a bad conscience. Well, formerly it was the other way around: work was afflicted with a bad conscience. A person of good family concealed the fact that he worked if need compelled him to work. The slave worked under the pressure of the feeling that he was doing something contemptible: ‘doing’ was itself contemptible. ‘Nobility and honour are attached solely to otium and bellum’22 – that was the ancient prejudice!