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withdrawn, smoking males) is to me repugnant.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.