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Christopher Morley On Laziness Essay

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Christopher Morley On Laziness Essay
Christopher Morley wrote “On Laziness”, an essay about laziness in 1920. Morley wrote this just after World War I to explain the effect of philosophical laziness on a person's happiness. The author proved that the philosophically slothful man is the only truly happy person using comparative analysis, historical evidence, and repetition.
In his essay “on Laziness” Morley compares the life of a lazy person to that of an active person to prove that a philosophically lazy person is happier. Morley states “It is the bustling man who always gets put on committees, who is asked to solve the problems of other people and to neglect his own.” What he is saying here is that people who have the reputation of not being lazy will be tasked with solving
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Throughout the essay Morley repeats the word lazy and it’s synonyms. Doing this helps the essay stay on topic and allow the reader to thoroughly understand what the essay is about. Morley also uses repetition to make laziness sound good by putting it next to passages about being happy or successful. When he talks about the doctor or the poet who are both successful people he describes them as lazy and slothful on multiple occasions. Doing this allows your brain to make connections between happiness and laziness. This is very beneficial to his essay because it makes the reader come to the conclusion that the lazy man is happier than the active man.
By the end of the essay the seemingly ridiculous claim has transformed into a more realistic, understandable idea. This transformation has come about thanks to the key rhetorical devices Morley used.The devices he used to prove that the philosophically lazy man is the only truly happy man were comparison of two types of lives, looking at real examples of people who had achieved successful laziness in the past, and by repeating words like lazy around things that are related to success and/or

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