Christmas Spirit Quote by Richard H. Davis

A six months' holiday lands here less as leisure than as nervous laughter in the face of burnout. Richard H. Davis frames the break with a quick joke ("enough to make anyone laugh at anything") and then immediately punctures it with the real premise: he is "harassed and run down". The wit functions like a social mask, a way to present exhaustion without sounding melodramatic or unmanly in a culture that prized stamina and productivity, especially for a writer-journalist whose brand depended on perpetual motion.

The phrase "cut off from everything and start fresh" carries the fantasy of total reset: not just rest, but erasure. It's a retreat from obligations, correspondence, deadlines, and the low-grade performance of being available. Davis is honest about the psychological toll of opting out. "I feel miserably selfish" is not an aside; it's the bill that comes due when self-care collides with the era's moral economy of duty. He wants relief, but he also wants absolution.

That tension is the quote's engine. He can't simply take the holiday; he has to narrate it as both necessary and faintly shameful. Even the exaggerated length "six months" reads like a dare to propriety, a test of how much recuperation he is allowed before society decides he's indulging himself. Davis captures a modern predicament in older clothing: the private collapse hidden inside a public joke, and the guilt that shadows any attempt to choose oneself over the machine.