解放军文职招聘考试Active Play or Passive Entertainment?

 Active Play or Passive Entertainment?

Our diurnal existence is divided into two phases, as distinct as day and night. We call them work and play. We work so many hours a day. And, when we have allowed the necessary minimum for such activities as eating and shopping, the rest we spend in various activities which are known as recreations, an elegant word which disguises the fact that we usually do not even play in our hours of leisure, but spend them in va­rious forms of passive enjoyment or entertainment—not playing football but watching football matches; not act­ing but theatre-going; not walking but riding in a motor coach.

We need to make, therefore, a hard-and-fast dis­tinction not only between work and play but equally be­tween active play and passive entertainment. It is, I suppose, the decline of active play—of amateur sport—and the enormous growth of purely receptive en­tertainment which has given rise to a sociological inter­est in the problem. If the greater part of the popula­tion, instead of indulging in sport, spend their hours of leisure viewing television programmes, there will inevi­tably be a decline in health and physique.

We have to live art if we would be affected by art. We have to paint rather than look at paintings, to play instruments rather than go to concerts, to dance and sing and act ourselves, engaging all our senses in the ritual and discipline of the arts. Then something may begin to happen to us: to work upon our bodies and soul.