The Hanover Scene
THE spring season, with its attendant fevers, prompts a consideration of the fine art of wasting time. Our interest is not in mere basking or watching softball games or mumble-de-peg contests. Those are phases of socialized dolce far niente that any Papuan or member of the junior class can master in a week. We would treat, rather, of the demanding pressures of solitary time-wasting: frittering that calls for definite effort, for ingenuity, for dedication.
Broadly speaking, there are two situations that challenge the solo wastrel: first, when there is nothing else to do, and, secondly, when there is something else that ought to be done. For the practitioner in the former, or faute demieux, area, the chief tools are cards, paper-backs, crossword puzzles, and the radio.
First, the Persian, or Bicycle, playing cards. At a conservative estimate, there are an almost infinite number of forms of Patience or Solitaire, ranging from the chess-like intricacies and strategies of Morgan to the moderate intellectual demands of Accordion and Idiot's Delight. All solitaire games involve the creation of a pattern, and many players find their chief joy in a meticulous initial arrangement of cards on the table. Others, more intrigued by the end than the means, slap the cards down any old way in a vicious Stakhanovian attempt to waste time as rapidly as possible.
The railroad train, the barber shop, the rush seat call for active time-wasting with a minimum of apparatus. For these situations the most ready device is the paper-back thriller, usually selected hurriedly, with complete assurance that the text will furnish no such immodest display as the cover promises, and with reasonable expectation that, after feeling on vaguely familiar soil for 138 pages, we will realize that we have read the story at least once before. But the re-reading of a poor story rates almost as high in wasting circles as cheating at solitaire.
The crossword puzzle was invented for anyone with a pencil and familiarity with South American ungulates, the bitter vetch, monitor lizards, the weights of Djakarta, and the Scottish name for tellurium. Avoiding such esoterica as cryptograms and double-crostics, we consider it adequately wasteful to enrich our vocabulary with words like eri,tegs, sess, onager, and aar.
Television has hardly arrived as a mature time-waster, its appeal being more to the Kukla, Fran and Ollie set. Radio, however, has definitely come of age, and can be as anodyne as the most brutal Mickey Spillane. We recently had the fortune to be, for some days, the captive audience of a non-metropolitan station whose programs averaged five two-minute local commercials to the half hour and had, in addition, a generous quota of disc-jockey commentary that impressed us as being somewhat less than fey. The interstices were filled with hill-billy songs and more sophisticated renditions blaring with orchestrations and beginning "If anyone finds this, I love you." In his Politics, Aristotle warns against the or flute, as being an orgiastic rather than an ethical agent. How, we wonder, would he react to Sh-boom?
A more recondite field of useless endeavor faces us when we seek devices to postpone the performance of duties or obligations. Any good executive will busy his underlings in order to free himself for the contemplation and establishment of broad, sweeping principles. But to delay such establishment, to dawdle before the plunge into problems, to crowd the deadline - these call for a sublety of performance and a smoke screen of apparent dynamics that are far beyond the call of duty of the mere time-server in a doctor's waiting room. The primary requirement is a thoughtful mien. This can be followed by any of a number of gambits. For example: Reading the Mail - Speaking as one old Box-holder to another, we recommend this highly; especially items labelled "Air-mail reply requested." Revising Agenda - Copy onto a new and unsmudged sheet the majority of items left from the last list of "Things to do Today." Counting a Category - List, for example, the towns in the U. S. (or anywhere) in which you have slept, not forgetting that night in Wichita after Dave Porter's address to the Junior "Y" Convention. House Cleaning - Rearrange the contents of the flat drawer of your desk - that treasure trove of empty cigarette lighters and hotel credit cards.
There are doubtless better things to waste than time - Christian kisses, for instance - but few that we spend more time in wasting.
