i’ve written about
these letters before
and have been reading excerpts from them recently
— so here’s a clever view on time
Men are not angered by a mere misfortune, but by misfortune conceived as injury. And the sense of injury depends on the feeling that a legitimate claim has been denied.
. . . he regards time as his own and feels that it is being stolen.
The more claims on life, therefore, that your patient can be induced to make, the more often he will feel injured and, as a result, ill-tempered.
Now you will have noticed that nothing throws him into a passion so easily as to find a tract of time which he reckoned on having at his own disposal unexpectedly taken from him.