COMMENT

All this loud and continuous demand for hard exercise makes me tired. What this country needs is a rest. I rise in defense of the easy chair and the lounging robe.

There exists in this country today a widespread conspiracy against relaxation. A man goes it as hard as he can in his office, and then rushes away and hits it up like a maniac on the golf course, or plays tennis or squash, or handball, or medicine ball until he boils in every pore. . . . Nobody want to relax; nobody wants to ruminate, or drowse, or dream. We cultivate business on the golf course, solicit orders on furious motor drives on State highways, and go through violent motions in the unspeakable gymnasium because we don't know how to sit. . . . Unless you can brag about your score at this or that, unless you can recount your hunting tales and speeding yarns, you talk in strange languages to your luncheon campanions. We are a nation of sweating amateurs.

I have played football, and have competed on the track in all events ranging from the 220-yard dash to the two-mile run. I have run, like an imposing ass, mile after mile until it seemed that the heart must beat itself to pieces in the weary body. While I must admit that there was more or less fun in this, I have never enjoyed any phase of competitive college sports, save perhaps the moment of winning. All the rest was torture--physical and mental. . .

The glorification of college athletics has done much to establish the habit of athletics. It has also helped establish an illusion of life that makes harsh physical effort the thing; even after men go from the campus into business or the professions. . . . The vicious effect of it is this, that it tends to usurp all of one's waking hours and to cast them into activity, banishing that needed and delightful twilight zone of reverie and reflection that naturally intervenes between work and slumber. . . . The one who invented the crawly term of "lounge-lizard" is no friend of mine. He has laid an undeserved curse upon a great and worthy company of those who may properly prefer healing relaxation to this vulgar virility of modern days. N. A. FUESSLE in the Outlook