How to Live on Twenty-Four Hours a Day
阿诺德.本涅特 Arnold Bennett
IV THE CAUSE OF THE TROUBLES
In order to come to grips at once with the question of time-expenditure inall its actuality, I must choose an individual case for examination. I canonly deal with one case, and that case cannot be the average case, becausethere is no such case as the average case, just as there is no such man as theaverage man. Every man and every man's case is special.
But if I take the case of a Londoner who works in an office, whose officehours are from ten to six, and who spends fifty minutes morning and nightin travelling between his house door and his office door, I shall have got asnear to the average as facts permit. There are men who have to work longerfor a living, but there are others who do not have to work so long.
Fortunately the financial side of existence does not interest us here; for ourpresent purpose the clerk at a pound a week is exactly as well off as themillionaire in Carlton House-terrace.
Now the great and profound mistake which my typical man makes in regardto his day is a mistake of general attitude, a mistake which vitiates andweakens two-thirds of his energies and interests. In the majority of instanceshe does not precisely feel a passion for his business; at best he does not dislikeit. He begins his business functions with reluctance, as late as he can, and heends them with joy, as early as he can. And his engines while he is engagedin his business are seldom at their full "h.p." (I know that I shall be accusedby angry readers of traducing the city worker; but I am pretty thoroughlyacquainted with the City, and I stick to what I say.)
Yet in spite of all this he persists in looking upon those hours from ten tosix as "the day," to which the ten hours preceding them and the six hoursfollowing them are nothing but a prologue and epilogue. Such an attitude,
unconscious though it be, of course kills his interest in the odd sixteenhours, with the result that, even if he does not waste them, he does notcount them; he regards them simply as margin.
This general attitude is utterly illogical and unhealthy, since it formallygives the central prominence to a patch of time and a bunch of activitieswhich the man's one idea is to "get through" and have "done with." If aman makes two-thirds of his existence subservient to one-third, for whichadmittedly he has no absolutely feverish zest, how can he hope to live fullyand completely? He cannot.
If my typical man wishes to live fully and completely he must, in his mind,arrange a day within a day. And this inner day, a Chinese box in a largerChinese box, must begin at 6 p.m. and end at 10 a.m. It is a day of sixteenhours; and during all these sixteen hours he has nothing whatever to do butcultivate his body and his soul and his fellow men. During those sixteenhours he is free; he is not a wage-earner; he is not preoccupied with monetarycares; he is just as good as a man with a private income. This must be hisattitude. And his attitude is all important. His success in life (much moreimportant than the amount of estate upon what his executors will have topay estate duty) depends on it.
What? You say that full energy given to those sixteen hours will lessen thevalue of the business eight? Not so. On the contrary, it will assuredlyincrease the value of the business eight. One of the chief things whichmy typical man has to learn is that the mental faculties are capable of acontinuous hard activity; they do not tire like an arm or a leg. All theywant is change--not rest, except in sleep.
I shall now examine the typical man's current method of employing thesixteen hours that are entirely his, beginning with his uprising. I willmerely indicate things which he does and which I think he ought not todo, postponing my suggestions for "planting" the times which I shallhave cleared--as a settler clears spaces in a forest.
In justice to him I must say that he wastes very little time before heleaves the house in the morning at 9.10. In too many houses he getsup at nine, breakfasts between 9.7 and 9.9 1/2, and then bolts. Butimmediately he bangs the front door his mental faculties, which aretireless, become idle. He walks to the station in a condition of mentalcoma. Arrived there, he usually has to wait for the train. On hundredsof suburban stations every morning you see men calmly strolling upand down platforms while railway companies unblushingly rob themof time, which is more than money. Hundreds of thousands of hoursare thus lost every day simply because my typical man thinks so littleof time that it has never occurred to him to take quite easy precautionsagainst the risk of its loss.
He has a solid coin of time to spend every day--call it a sovereign. Hemust get change for it, and in getting change he is content to lose heavily.
can. And his engines while he is engagedin his business are seldom at their full "h.p." (I know that?
Supposing that in selling him a ticket the company said, "We will changeyou a sovereign, but we shall charge you three halfpence for doing so,"what would my typical man exclaim? Yet that is the equivalent of whatthe company does when it robs him of five minutes twice a day.
You say I am dealing with minutiae. I am. And later on I will justify myself.
Now will you kindly buy your paper and step into the train?