I find myself
growing increasingly irritated with the recent faddist clamor for
"Quality
Time." Droves of drearily earnest therapists and obnoxious self-help-
magazine feature writers are relentlessly trying to prod Americans into
spending Quality Time with their lovers, husbands, children, and friends.
When this sort of well-intentioned nagging appears in the New York press
it
betrays, in my opinion, a profound ignorance of urban culture and its
exigencies on the part of these sanctimonious cheerleaders. The truth is
that
New Yorkers who have any time at all left over after work, going out,
personal grooming, and a certain minimum amount of TV watching are not
in the least helped or improved by frittering away their precious few
leisure
minutes on so-called Quality Time with those close to them (for all the
good
that does...). No, the real self-help is going on in a clandestine
manner
in single people's apartments around the city. This salubrious activity
could
be labeled Spending Quality Time with Yourself. And it consists of an
occasional, surreptitious, highly satisfying rendezvous with sloth.
I refer to single people because this is one of those things you can't do properly if you're living with someone. "At best you'll be observed, at worst reprimanded," says an acquaintance who's in the know. If you live with someone, you have to wait until he or she, mercifully, goes away for the weekend. Because I'm not talking about a stray half hour here and there spent doing nothing except staring into the middle distance, but of a good two or three days spent in your bedroom by yourself, the door locked, the phone turned off, the rest of the universe blissfully shut out. "It's the great escape," says a friend of mine who frequently indulges, "a pleasant and innocuous form of temporary death."
This mini-fugue can take any number of forms, but among the several people I queried recently on this subject, four elements seem to be interchangeably pre-eminent: eating, watching television, reading, and sleeping. These pretty much cover the range and indicate the quality of activity, although some variations include listening to music, staring out of the window on sunny days (walks outside are out of the question), and, oddly enough, pacing. I was surprised to discover that one of my friends actually paces, since, as far as I'm concerned, the most attractive feature of these escapes is an extended stay in bed, interrupted only by frequent trips to the kitchen. (I envy future generations who will have mute androids to bring meals on trays to the bedroom, or, alternatively, sufficiently advanced technology to construct conveyor belts from the refrigerator to the bed.)
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