Activity

[...] They would turn up, every one of them, on the opening night. The screen would light up, they would feel a thrill of satisfaction. But the colours had faded with age, the picture wobbled on the screen, the women were of another age; they would come out; they would be sad. It was not the film t…

[...] the incommensurability, perceptible in every domain, between the quality of their taste in clothing (nothing was too fine for them) and the amount of money they normally had available was an obvious, if ultimately secondary, sign of their material situation. They were not the only ones; rathe…

There was washing, drying, ironing. Gas, electricity and the telephone. Children. Clothes and underclothes. Mustard. Packet soups, tinned soups. Hair: how to wash it, how to dry it, how to make it hold a wave, how to make it shine. Students, fingernails, cough syrup, typewriters, fertilisers, tract…

Like almost all their colleagues, Jérôme and Sylvie had become market researchers by necessity and not by choice. No-one knows, in any case, where the untrammelled development of their natural inclinations towards idleness would have led them. There again, history had chosen for them. Of course, li…

But between these too grand daydreams in which they wallowed with strange self-indulgence, and their total lack of any actual doing, no rational plan, matching the objective necessities to their financial means, arose to fill the gap. The vastness of their desires paralysed them.