"There is only one
reason why all grown-up people do not play with toys: and it is a fair reason.
The reason is that playing with toys takes so very much more time and trouble
than anything else. Playing, as children mean playing, is the most serious
thing in the world. And as soon as we have small duties or small sorrows we
have to abandon to some extent so enormous and ambitious a plan of life. We
have enough strength for politics and commerce and art and philosophy: we do
not have enough strength for play. This is the truth which everyone
will recognize who, as a child, has ever played with anything at all; anyone
who has played with bricks, anyone who has played with dolls, anyone who has
played with tin soldiers. My journalistic work, which earns money, is not
pursued with such awful persistency as that work which earned
nothing."
"Broadly then, what keeps adults from joining in children's games is,
generally speaking, not that they have no pleasure in them; it is simply that
they have no leisure for them. It is that they cannot afford the expenditure of
toil and time and consideration of so grand and grave a scheme. I have been
myself attempting for some time past to complete a play in a small toy theatre
...though I have worked much harder at the toy theatre than I ever worked on
any tale or article, I cannot finish it; the work seems too heavy for me. I
have to break off and betake myself to lighter employments; such as [writing]
the biographies of great men."
"All this gives me a feeling touching the real meaning of immortality. In
this world we cannot have pure pleasure. This is partly because pure pleasure
would be dangerous to us and to our neighbors. But it is partly because pure
pleasure is a great deal too much trouble. If I am ever in any other and better
world, I hope that I shall have enough time to play with nothing but toy
theatres; and I hope that I shall have enough divine and superhuman energy to
act at least one play in them without a hitch."
--from "The Toy Theatre," in Tremendous Trifles (1909),
by G. K. Chesterton.
