Life's Pleasures Quote by Donald McKay

Refusing the tyranny of the clock, McKay frames discipline as a fashionable superstition. The line is almost a polite side-eye at the Protestant work-ethic version of creativity: up at 6, calisthenics, oatmeal, then the sanctioned three-to-four-hour “production” window. By itemizing the routine so neatly, he makes it sound less like artistry and more like factory labor with better lighting. The subtext isn’t laziness; it’s a rejection of the idea that craft can be reliably summoned on command, like a shift at the mill.

That matters coming from a 19th-century designer, a profession caught between art and industry. McKay lived in an era when timekeeping was tightening its grip: railroads standardized schedules, factories normalized regimented hours, and “productivity” started to look like a moral category. Against that backdrop, his resistance reads as a quiet defense of irregular attention - the kind design work often requires. You don’t just “produce words” (or sketches, or plans) on cue; you test, discard, stare, revise. The most valuable minutes can look unproductive from the outside.

There’s also a subtle status argument here. The curated morning ritual is presented as something “many writers” do - a trend, maybe even a performance. McKay claims a different authority: not the virtue of routine, but the confidence to work when the work is ready. It’s an insistence that process is personal, not prescriptive.