The Craving for Excitement

Dominion, Volume 26, Issue 88, 7 January 1933, Page 16

The Craving for Excitement

4 4 ' EISURE (so both the optimists and the philosophers of the I machine age predict.) is to be our next problem; not the enB forced leisure which so many have been tasting with crooked j mouths this past six months, but a planned leisure, made possible and necessary by the efficiency of labour-saving devices, and to become a menace or a blessing according to the ability of man to control his own destinies. In any balanced civilisation leisure will inevitably burn to books,” says a writer in the “Saturday Review of Literature” (New York). “Already one can see the powerful effects of industrialism upon reading. Neverin any earlier period have so many books been written whose purpose is solely excitement.

“The detective story, philosophically considered, is nothing but a patented device for making leisure exciting. So is the scandalous memoir, so is the debunking biography and the mirror of business or polities. So is the erotic and flippant novel of society, so is the melodrama of fortune and love. But this powerful urge’ to excite has affected serious literature also. “Our'purpose is to note that the literature of peace has not been equally cultivated, although its place and need in the problem of leisure is equally great. Our authors (or our publishers) have assumed that the

new leisure asks for escape as well as excitement, but the escape they think of is an escape into sentiment or romance..

“Right enough, but it is nob true that peace and sentimental illusions are synonymous. Those same multitudes that push from the city out into the open spaces have desires that neither excitement nor sentiment will satisfy. Their leisure for reading carries with it an appreciation of unhurried books. “They seek, in tjjeir leisure, not an increase of the tempo of living, which to other minds, or the same minds in other moods, is the thing desired, but a slowing down of time.

“Many a good book, many a good play is spoiled for them by the delusive theory that the new leisure must have tom-toms and saxophones. The purveyors of our amusement have been misled by the ease with which excitement works. Crowds rise to it noisily, but there are other crowds not satisfied, and not so evident.

“We have learned to its last vibration the technique of excitement. That is not enough. If we are to fill leisure with books, we must be better psychologists. The demand for jazz is satisfied, but because some millions escaping from the industrial machine need only titillation, are there to be no cakes and ale for those of-quieter digestion? They may be millions too.”