"But," someone may remark, with the English disregard of everything
except the point, "what is he driving at with his twenty-four hours a
day? I have no difficulty in living on twenty-four hours a day. I do
all that I want to do, and still find time to go in for newspaper
competitions. Surely it is a simple affair, knowing that one has only
twenty-four hours a day, to content one's self with twenty-four hours a
day!"
To you, my dear sir, I present my excuses and apologies. You are
precisely the man that I have been wishing to meet for about forty
years. Will you kindly send me your name and address, and state your
charge for telling me how you do it? Instead of me talking to you, you
ought to be talking to me. Please come forward. That you exist, I am
convinced, and that I have not yet encountered you is my loss.
Meanwhile, until you appear, I will continue to chat with my companions
in distress--that innumerable band of souls who are haunted, more or
less painfully, by the feeling that the years slip by, and slip by, and
slip by, and that they have not yet been able to get their lives into
proper working order.
If we analyse that feeling, we shall perceive it to be, primarily, one
of uneasiness, of expectation, of looking forward, of aspiration. It
is a source of constant discomfort, for it behaves like a skeleton at
the feast of all our enjoyments. We go to the theatre and laugh; but
between the acts it raises a skinny finger at us. We rush violently
for the last train, and while we are cooling a long age on the platform
waiting for the last train, it promenades its bones up and down by our
side and inquires: "O man, what hast thou done with thy youth? What
art thou doing with thine age?" You may urge that this feeling of
continuous looking forward, of aspiration, is part of life itself, and
inseparable from life itself. True!
But there are degrees. A man may desire to go to Mecca. His
conscience tells him that he ought to go to Mecca. He fares forth,
either by the aid of Cook's, or unassisted; he may probably never reach
Mecca; he may drown before he gets to Port Said; he may perish
ingloriously on the coast of the Red Sea; his desire may remain
eternally frustrate. Unfulfilled aspiration may always trouble him.
But he will not be tormented in the same way as the man who, desiring
to reach Mecca, and harried by the desire to reach Mecca, never leaves
Brixton.
It is something to have left Brixton. Most of us have not left
Brixton. We have not even taken a cab to Ludgate Circus and inquired
from Cook's the price of a conducted tour. And our excuse to ourselves
is that there are only twenty-four hours in the day.
If we further analyse our vague, uneasy aspiration, we shall, I think,
see that it springs from a fixed idea that we ought to do something in
addition to those things which we are loyally and morally obliged to
do. We are obliged, by various codes written and unwritten, to
maintain ourselves and our families (if any) in health and comfort, to
pay our debts, to save, to increase our prosperity by increasing our
efficiency. A task sufficiently difficult! A task which very few of
us achieve! A task often beyond our skill! Yet, if we succeed in it,
as we sometimes do, we are not satisfied; the skeleton is still with us.
And even when we realise that the task is beyond our skill, that our
powers cannot cope with it, we feel that we should be less discontented
if we gave to our powers, already overtaxed, something still further to
do.
And such is, indeed, the fact. The wish to accomplish something
outside their formal programme is common to all men who in the course
of evolution have risen past a certain level.
Until an effort is made to satisfy that wish, the sense of uneasy
waiting for something to start which has not started will remain to
disturb the peace of the soul. That wish has been called by many names.
It is one form of the universal desire for knowledge. And it is so
strong that men whose whole lives have been given to the systematic
acquirement of knowledge have been driven by it to overstep the limits
of their programme in search of still more knowledge. Even Herbert
Spencer, in my opinion the greatest mind that ever lived, was often
forced by it into agreeable little backwaters of inquiry.
I imagine that in the majority of people who are conscious of the wish
to live--that is to say, people who have intellectual curiosity--the
aspiration to exceed formal programmes takes a literary shape. They
would like to embark on a course of reading. Decidedly the British
people are becoming more and more literary. But I would point out that
literature by no means comprises the whole field of knowledge, and that
the disturbing thirst to improve one's self--to increase one's
knowledge--may well be slaked quite apart from literature. With the
various ways of slaking I shall deal later. Here I merely point out to
those who have no natural sympathy with literature that literature is
not the only well.