Topic

Wastage

The collection's opening irony is Twain's reversal of thrift: the secret of life is to eat what you like and let it fight out inside. But the serious entries establish the stakes. Jefferson's never-spend-before-you-have-it is the economic principle. Rogers' observation about people spending money they haven't earned to buy things they don't want to impress people they don't like is the most socially precise diagnosis of waste in the collection: the triple failure of acquisition, desire, and relationship simultaneously. Aesop's no-act-of-kindness-is-ever-wasted provides the counterpoint: some expenditures return more than they cost. Shakespeare's I-wasted-time-and-now-time-wastes-me is the most elegiac entry, the pun doing double work. Disraeli on the waste of explanations applies to all unnecessary speech: the greatest time-sink in an educated life is explaining yourself to people who already have an opinion. What the collection argues is that waste is most precisely understood as the gap between what something cost and what it actually accomplished.