The satisfaction at not having time
From Remembrance of Things Past, Volume 4: Cities of the Plain
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The narrator frequently leaves the Grand Hotel at Balbec to go and dine at la Raspelière with Mme Verdurin. To do so, he has to make a long train journey, which he particularly enjoys, but which is a laughable waste of time in the eyes of the first president of the Court of Appeal in Caen, a regular guest of the hotel. The narrator then points out the irony of someone as busy as this chief magistrate castigating idle activities. For it is these very activities that allow busy men to distinguish themselves, and even to be lauded when they are promoted in their careers:
It was already night when we got into the omnibus or carriage which was to take us to the station where we would find the little train. And in the hall the chief magistrate was saying to us: “Ah! You are going to la Raspelière! Sapristi, she has a nerve, your Mme. Verdurin, to make you travel an hour by train in the dark, simply to dine with her. And then to start off again at ten o’clock at night, with a wind blowing like the very devil. It is easy to see that you have nothing else to do,” he added, rubbing his hands together. No doubt he spoke thus from annoyance at not having been invited, and also from the satisfaction that people feel who are ‘busy’— though it be with the most idiotic occupation — at ‘not having time’ to do what you are doing.
Certainly it is only right that the man who draws up reports, adds up figures, answers business letters, follows the movements of the stock exchange, should feel when he says to you with a sneer: “It’s all very well for you; you have nothing better to do,” an agreeable sense of his own superiority. But this would be no less contemptuous, would be even more so (for dining out is a thing that the busy man does also) were your recreation writing Hamlet or merely reading it. Wherein busy men shew a want of reflexion. For the disinterested culture which seems to them a comic pastime of idle people at the moment when they find them engaged in it is, they ought to remember, the same that in their own profession brings to the fore men who may not be better magistrates or administrators than themselves but before whose rapid advancement they bow their heads, saying: “It appears he’s a great reader, a most distinguished individual.” But above all the chief magistrate did not take into account that what pleased me about these dinners at la Raspelière was that, as he himself said quite rightly, though as a criticism, they ‘meant a regular journey,’ a journey whose charm appeared to me all the more thrilling in that it was not an object in itself, and no one made any attempt to find pleasure in it — that being reserved for the party for which we were bound, and greatly modified by all the atmosphere that surrounded it. 📖