How to Live on Twenty-Four Hours a Day
阿诺德.本涅特 Arnold Bennett
II THE DESIRE TO EXCEED ONE'S PROGRAMME
"But," someone may remark, with the English disregard of everythingexcept 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 Iwant to do, and still find time to go in for newspaper competitions. Surelyit is a simple affair, knowing that one has only twenty-four hours a day, tocontent one's self with twenty-four hours a day!"
To you, my dear sir, I present my excuses and apologies. You are preciselythe man that I have been wishing to meet for about forty years. Will youkindly send me your name and address, and state your charge for telling mehow 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 notyet encountered you is my loss. Meanwhile, until you appear, I will continueto chat with my companions in distress--that innumerable band of souls whoare haunted, more or less painfully, by the feeling that the years slip by, andslip by, and slip by, and that they have not yet been able to get their lives intoproper working order.
If we analyse that feeling, we shall perceive it to be, primarily, one ofuneasiness, of expectation, of looking forward, of aspiration. It is a sourceof constant discomfort, for it behaves like a skeleton at the feast of all ourenjoyments. We go to the theatre and laugh; but between the acts it raisesa skinny finger at us. We rush violently for the last train, and while we arecooling a long age on the platform waiting for the last train, it promenadesits bones up and down by our side and inquires: "O man, what hast thoudone with thy youth? What art thou doing with thine age?" You may urgethat this feeling of continuous looking forward, of aspiration, is part of lifeitself, and inseparable from life itself. True!
But there are degrees. A man may desire to go to Mecca. His consciencetells him that he ought to go to Mecca. He fares forth, either by the aid ofCook's, or unassisted; he may probably never reach Mecca; he may drownbefore he gets to Port Said; he may perish ingloriously on the coast of theRed Sea; his desire may remain eternally frustrate. Unfulfilled aspirationmay always trouble him. But he will not be tormented in the same way asthe man who, desiring to reach Mecca, and harried by the desire to reachMecca, never leaves Brixton.
It is something to have left Brixton. Most of us have not left Brixton. Wehave not even taken a cab to Ludgate Circus and inquired from Cook's theprice of a conducted tour. And our excuse to ourselves is that there are onlytwenty-four hours in the day.
If we further analyse our vague, uneasy aspiration, we shall, I think, seethat it springs from a fixed idea that we ought to do something in additionto those things which we are loyally and morally obliged to do. We areobliged, by various codes written and unwritten, to maintain ourselvesand our families (if any) in health and comfort, to pay our debts, to save,to increase our prosperity by increasing our efficiency. A task sufficientlydifficult! A task which very few of us achieve! A task often beyond ourskill! yet, if we succeed in it, as we sometimes do, we are not satisfied; theskeleton is still with us.
And even when we realise tat the task is beyond our skill, that our powerscannot cope with it, we feel that we should be less discontented if we gaveto our powers, already overtaxed, something still further to do.
And such is, indeed, the fact. The wish to accomplish something outsidetheir formal programme is common to all men who in the course of evolutionhave risen past a certain level.
Until an effort is made to satisfy that wish, the sense of uneasy waiting forsomething to start which has not started will remain to disturb the peace ofthe soul. That wish has been called by many names. It is one form of theuniversal desire for knowledge. And it is so strong that men whose wholelives have been given to the systematic acquirement of knowledge havebeen driven by it to overstep the limits of their programme in search ofstill more knowledge. Even Herbert Spencer, in my opinion the greatestmind that ever lived, was often forced by it into agreeable little backwatersof inquiry.
I imagine that in the majority of people who are conscious of the wish tolive--that is to say, people who have intellectual curiosity--the aspirationto exceed formal programmes takes a literary shape. They would like toembark on a course of reading. Decidedly the British people are becomingmore and more literary. But I would point out that literature by no meanscomprises the whole field of knowledge, and that the disturbing thirst toimprove one's self--to increase one's knowledge--may well be slaked quiteapart from literature. With the various ways of slaking I shall deal later.Here I merely point out to those who have no natural sympathy withliterature that literature is not the only well.