and, generally speaking, I think it might be applied to all cases in which the toil spent over the making of a thing is out of all proportion to the enjoyment derived from it.  But the difficulty underlying it is that it assumes a knowledge of what a man’s duty is in this world—­and I am not by any means sure that we know.  Look at the phrase ’a waste of time.’  How do we know exactly how much time a man ought to allot to sleep, to work, to leisure?  I had an old puritanical friend who was very fond of telling people that they wasted time.  He himself spent nearly two hours of every day in dressing and undressing.  That is to say that when he died at the age of seventy-six, he had spent about six entire years in making and unmaking his toilet!  Let us assume that everyone is bound to give a certain amount of time to doing the necessary work of the world—­enough to support, feed, clothe, and house himself, with a margin to spare for the people who can’t support themselves and can’t work.  Then there are a lot of outlying things which must be done—­the work of statesmen, lawyers, doctors, writers—­all the people who organise, keep order, cure, or amuse people.  Then there are all the people who make luxuries and comforts—­things not exactly necessary, but still reasonable indulgences.  Now let us suppose that anyone is genuinely and sensibly occupied in any one of these ways, and does his or her fair share of the world’s work:  who is to say how such workers are to spend their margin of time?  There are obviously certain people who are mere drones in the hive—­rich, idle, extravagant people:  we will admit that they are wasters.  But I don’t admit for a moment that all the time spent in enjoying oneself is wasted, and I think that people have a right to choose what they do enjoy.  I am inclined to believe that we are here to live, and that work is only a part of our material limitations.  A great deal of the usefulness of work is not its intrinsic value, but its value to ourselves.  It isn’t only what we perform that matters; it is the fact that work forces us into relations with other people, which I take to be the experience we all need.  In the old dreary books of my childhood, the elders were always hounding the young people into doing something useful—­useful reading, useful sewing, and so forth.  But I am inclined to believe that sociability and talk are more useful than reading, and that solitary musing and dreaming and looking about are useful too.  All activity is useful, all interchange, all perception.  What isn’t useful is anything which hides life from you, any habit that drugs you into inactivity and idleness, anything which makes you believe that life is romantic and sentimental and fatuous.  I wouldn’t even go so far as to say that all the time spent in squabbling and quarrelling is useless, because it brings you up against people who think differently from yourself.  That becomes wasteful the moment it leaves you with the impotent desire