Workaholics

A lawyer’s vacation is defined as the space between a cross-examiner’s question and a witness’s answer. –Rufus Choate, early American lawyer

I went to California to a stress-reduction course and then I caught the red-eye back so I wouldn’t miss any work. –Dr. William Fair

Mine is a compulsion not so easily defined as boozing, smoking or betting. But, according to those around me, it is just as perilous to my happiness and theirs. Perhaps it is best described as an infatuation with “buzz,” with filling every minute with an endless whirl of motion—necessary or not. It’s not quite workaholism in its purest, career-obsessive form. I long ago passed the age at which the glittering prizes seemed but a few gallons of midnight oil away. Nor it is a compulsive accumulating of trivial facts and pointless achievements in a classic male trainspotting mode. Rather, it’s a fear of any sort of lull or repose. A nagging, ever-present feeling that if you cease to do, you cease to be. –Richard Morrison

What he [V. S. Pritchett] wrote of Gibbon applies equally to himself: “Sooner or later, the great men turn out to be all alike. They never stop working. They never lose a minute. It is very depressing.” --Benjamin Schwarz