"Once, in the course of an ill-spent life, it was my fate to go to the theatre some two hundred and fifty times in one year. On business, I need not to add; one would hardly do that sort of thing for pleasure. I was paid to go.
By the end of the year - and, for that matter, long before our planet had completed its orbit round the sun - I had to come to the conclusion that i was not paid enough; that, indeed, I could never be paid enough for this particular job. I gave it up; and nothing would now induce me to resume it.
Since then, my attendances at the theatre have averaged perhaps three per annum.
And yet there are people who go to every first night, not because they have to, not because the griping belly must be filled, but because they like it. They are not paid to go; they pay, as though for a privilege. The ways of men are indeed strange."
{image: volksbuhne theatre, rosa-luxemburg-platz, "Ein Chor Irrt Sich Gewaltig", René Pollesch. title/text: aldous huxley, "along the road: notes and essays of a tourist", the phoenix library, london, 1928, p. 253}