If you live in the suburbs you devote perhaps two hours each day
to travel. Two hours per day means practically one-fifth of your
active life.
How many readers make any use of those two hours, and feel each
day that they have been well spent? ----
Instead of being wasted, those hours should be among your best.
Never mind if you are clinging to a strap because companies are
licensed to exploit you. Never mind if you are tired and weary
when the day is ended. The tired brain often thinks better than
the fresh one. And man, so recently descended from the monkey
who had to think while hanging head down, ought to have no
trouble thinking as he hangs from his strap--head up. ----
Some in the cars play cards as they travel homeward. Others talk
gossip, and tens of thousands waste too much time on this and
other newspapers.
Try this experiment: Make up your mind to devote your hours of
travel to thinking. The brain, like the muscles, needs definite
and well-planned exercise. It must be methodical and regular.
There is no limit to its possible results. You would be glad to
spend your two travelling hours in a gymnasium on wheels. Make
of your homeward car a mental gymnasium. Each night or morning,
take up some one line of thought and follow it to its end--or as
far as your mind can take you. Learn to observe, to study, to
reflect. Don't look at your fellow passengers as calves look at
each other on the way to the slaughter house.
Look, as a human being, at other human beings. There they sit or
stand or hang. Some chatter, others scowl, fret, fume, complain,
brag, grin or otherwise express the strange emotions that move us
here.
They are all ghosts, as Carlyle tells you, imprisoned for a time
in coverings of flesh, and a car packed full of real ghosts
passing over the earth on their quick journey to the grave ought
to stir you. ----
The giggling shopgirls whose life of misery is still a joke to
them--blessed youth!--should interest you deeply. And the negro,
too, with a tired black face, resting for the next day's
slavery--slavery on a wage basis, but slavery all the same.
Possibly you despise his thick lips. But those lips are carved
on every sphinx in Egypt's sand, and if you could go back far
enough you would find the ancestors of that negro, before the
days of the Pharaohs, laying the foundations of your religion and
locating the stars in heaven. At that time your forbears were
gibbering cave savages, sharpening bones and gnawing raw flesh.
When you see the negro on the opposite seat, the ill-starred one
who has gone down in the human race while we have gone up, think
about him, study him, speculate as to his ultimate end--and your
own. Don't merely say to yourself, "That's a plain negro," and
go on chewing gum. ----
The pictures that flash by your car windows should help you to
think.
The train rumbles over the switches, and in the dusk a swinging
lantern tells you that a man is at work, guiding you safely when
your work is done. Can't you take an interest in that human
atom, representing the Power that swings our tiny sun in space,
lighting us on our journey toward the constellation Hercules?
----
A black steeple is outlined against the dark-blue sky of the
evening. That is a finger of stone, built by man to point
everlastingly toward Infinite Power. It now points "upward." In
twelve hours--as the earth slowly turns--it will be pointing
"downward." But there is no upward or downward in the carpentry
of the universe. In the twenty-four hours, as it turns round
with the earth, that steeple points toward all the corners of
space, and constantly it points toward Eternal Wisdom and Justice
in every corner. ----
This is tiresome? All right, then we'll stop. But whether we
tire or interest you, remember:
As a man thinks, so he grows. Think, study, use all the hours
that separate your croupy cradle from your gloomy grave. Those
hours are few.