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“I have not yet looked at the Internet. Generally I leave it till I come back tired from my walk; it amuses me then to see what the noisy world is doing, what new self- torments men have discovered, what new forms of vain toil, what new occasions of peril and of strife. I grudge to give the first freshness of the morning mind to things so sad and foolish.”
That’s Henry Ryecroft, describing one of his ordinary (read: enchanted) mornings after he received a small annuity and decided to retire early and live out his remaining days in simplicity: walks, gardening, and reading. He’s the protagonist in George Gissing’s 1903 novella, The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft.
I modernized the passage a bit: I substituted “Internet” for “newspaper.”
