Gentlemen, I am joking, and I know myself that my jokes are not brilliant, but you know one can't take everything as a joke. I am, perhaps, jesting against the grain. Gentlemen, I am tormented by questions; answer them for me.

— Notes from the Underground

It came upon me sitting in the dark on some Friday evening that I should declare myself an enemy of weekends.

You and my colleagues have asked me why I would say such a thing, and in your asking, with bated breath, I hear gasps and sighs as if in sitting in the dark alone with my thoughts I had made a declaration of war against leisure itself, that Classically liberal self-assurance, that very foundation of our happiness. It is your belief that the enemy of leisure fears sanity. Upon your insistence the enemy of leisure fears pleasure. He is insane because every tomorrow is without reward, and without reward there can be no pleasure. He looks on in horror at the rising and the setting of the sun, no matter what day it is, and during the moratorium that is the weekend he hears the Vulcan god of Progress descending, his robot chariot carrying the instruments of Monday, an awful god with an awful mercy.

No rational man has a love of work for work itself, that much we have already established, though in the dark this too I have disputed. Rational men work for reward, they love to be loved, they sacrifice to gain. And so you have asked of me for what I should strive, from Monday through Friday, if not leisure for leisure's sake? Why should I work if not to be rewarded, why should I love if not to be loved, why I should sacrifice if not to gain?

On Monday we work and these questions are not ours to ask; on Sunday we sleep and they are not ours to answer. For we are but machines, spokes in a wheel of seven days, and we turn effortlessly, effortlessly, effortlessly like the hours and the days and the weeks and the years.