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Work and Play What do we mean by leisure, and why should we assume that it represents a problem to be solved by the arts? The great ages of art were not conspicuous for their leisure at least, art was not an activity associated with leisure. It was a craft like any other, concerned with the making of necessary things. Leisure, in the present meaning of the word, did not exist. Leisure, before the Industrial Revolution, meant no more than time or opportunity If your leisure served, I would speak with you. says one of Shakespeares characters. Phrases which we still use, such as at your leisure , preserve this original meaning. But when we speak of leisure nowadays, we are not thinking of securing time or opportunity to do something; time is heavy on our hands, and the problem is how to fill it. Leisure no longer signifies a space with some difficulty secured against the pressure of events: rather it is a pervasive emptiness for which we must invent occupations. Leisure is a vacuum, a desperate state of vacancy a vacancy of mind and body. It has been commandeered by the sociologists and the psychologists: it is a problem. Our diurnal existence is divided into two phases, as distinct as day and night. We call them work and play. We work so many hours a day, and, when we have allowed the necessary minimum for such activities as eating and shopping, the rest we spend in various activities which are known as recreations, an elegant word which disguises the fact that we usually do not even play in our hours of leisure, but spend them in various forms of passive enjoyment or entertainment not football but watching football matches; not acting, but theatre-going; not walking, but riding in a motor coach. | 
