_ You get into the morning train with your newspaper, and you calmly and
majestically give yourself up to your newspaper. You do not hurry. You
know you have at least half an hour of security in front of you. As your
glance lingers idly at the advertisements of shipping and of songs on the
outer pages, your air is the air of a leisured man, wealthy in time, of a
man from some planet where there are a hundred and twenty-four hours
a day instead of twenty-four. I am an impassioned reader of newspapers.
I read five English and two French dailies, and the news-agents alone
know how many weeklies, regularly. I am obliged to mention this personal
fact lest I should be accused of a prejudice against newspapers when I say
that I object to the reading of newspapers in the morning train. Newspapers
are produced with rapidity, to be read with rapidity. There is no place in my
daily programme for newspapers. I read them as I may in odd moments.
But I do read them. The idea of devoting to them thirty or forty consecutive
minutes of wonderful solitude (for nowhere can one more perfectly immerse
one's self in one's self than in a compartment full of silent, withdrawn, smoking
males) is to me repugnant. I cannot possibly allow you to scatter priceless
pearls of time with such Oriental lavishness. You are not the Shah of time.
Let me respectfully remind you that you have no more time than I have. No
newspaper reading in trains! I have already "put by" about three-quarters of
an hour for use.
Now you reach your office. And I abandon you there till six o'clock. I am
aware that you have nominally an hour (often in reality an hour and a half)
in the midst of the day, less than half of which time is given to eating. But
I will leave you all that to spend as you choose. You may read your
newspapers then.
I meet you again as you emerge from your office. You are pale and tired.
At any rate, your wife says you are pale, and you give her to understand
that you are tired. During the journey home you have been gradually
working up the tired feeling. The tired feeling hangs heavy over the
mighty suburbs of London like a virtuous and melancholy cloud,
particularly in winter. You don't eat immediately on your arrival home.
But in about an hour or so you feel as if you could sit up and take a little
nourishment. And you do. Then you smoke, seriously; you see friends;
you potter; you play cards; you flirt with a book; you note that old age is
creeping on; you take a stroll; you caress the piano.... By Jove! a quarter
past eleven. You then devote quite forty minutes to thinking about going
to bed; and it is conceivable that you are acquainted with a genuinely good
whisky. At last you go to bed, exhausted by the day's work. Six hours,
probably more, have gone since you left the office--gone like a dream,
gone like magic, unaccountably gone!
That is a fair sample case. But you say: "It's all very well for you to talk.
A man *is* tired. A man must see his friends. He can't always be on the
stretch." Just so. But when you arrange to go to the theatre (especially
with a pretty woman) what happens? You rush to the suburbs; you spare
no toil to make yourself glorious in fine raiment; you rush back to town in
another train; you keep yourself on the stretch for four hours, if not five;
you take her home; you take yourself home. You don't spend three-quarters
of an hour in "thinking about" going to bed. You go. Friends and fatigue
have equally been forgotten, and the evening has seemed so exquisitely
long (or perhaps too short)! And do you remember that time when you
were persuaded to sing in the chorus of the amateur operatic society, and
slaved two hours every other night for three months? Can you deny that
when you have something definite to look forward to at eventide, something
that is to employ all your energy--the thought of that something gives a glow
and a more intense vitality to the whole day?
What I suggest is that at six o'clock you look facts in the face and admit that
you are not tired (because you are not, you know), and that you arrange your
evening so that it is not cut in the middle by a meal. By so doing you will
have a clear expanse of at least three hours. I do not suggest that you should
employ three hours every night of your life in using up your mental energy.
But I do suggest that you might, for a commencement, employ an hour and a
half every other evening in some important and consecutive cultivation of the
mind. You will still be left with three evenings for friends, bridge, tennis,
domestic scenes, odd reading, pipes, gardening, pottering, and prize
competitions. You will still have the terrific wealth of forty-five hours
between 2 p.m. Saturday and 10 a.m. Monday. If you persevere you will
soon want to pass four evenings, and perhaps five, in some sustained
endeavour to be genuinely alive. And you will fall out of that habit of
muttering to yourself at 11.15 p.m., "Time to be thinking about going to
bed." The man who begins to go to bed forty minutes before he opens
his bedroom door is bored; that is to say, he is not living.
But remember, at the start, those ninety nocturnal minutes thrice a week
must be the most important minutes in the ten thousand and eighty. They
must be sacred, quite as sacred as a dramatic rehearsal or a tennis match.
Instead of saying, "Sorry I can't see you, old chap, but I have to run off to
the tennis club," you must say, "...but I have to work." This, I admit, is
intensely difficult to say. Tennis is so much more urgent than the immortal
soul. _