If we hesitate in pitying the drug fool who saturates cocaine with himself, why should we pity the sillier doper who takes speed instead of cocaine?

In Renascence times, life was swifter and more sanely feverish than in ours. Sir Philip Sidney was an ambassador at sixteen (...).

The slowness of our life is such that we do not consider ourselves old at forty. The speed of vehicles has taken the speed out of our souls. We live very slowly and that is why we are so easily bored. Life has become a countryside to us. We do not work enough and we pretend to work too much. We move very quickly from one point where nothing is being done to another point where there is nothing to do, and we call this the feverish haste of modern life. It is not the fever of hurry, but the hurry of fever.

Modern life is an agitated leisure, a shrinking within agitation from ordered motion.