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.
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.
. . . he regards time as his own and feels that it is being stolen.