In Praise of Leisure

From my earliest memory I lived with books of all kinds. There were stacks on my bedroom floor, and they lined the dusty walls of my family’s Victorian house. My older brother taught me to read and infected me with an appetite for reading; both of my parents were lovers of books, words, and ideas without professional training or support, amateurs in the original and best sense. San Francisco in the 1970s was a strange place for many famous reasons, but its basic commitment to leisure is clear to me only now that we have passed into a far less leisurely age.