How to Live on Twenty-Four Hours a Day
阿诺德.本涅特 Arnold Bennett
V TENNIS AND THE IMMORTAL SOUL
You get into the morning train with your newspaper, and you calmly andmajestically give yourself up to your newspaper. You do not hurry. Youknow you have at least half an hour of security in front of you. As yourglance lingers idly at the advertisements of shipping and of songs on theouter pages, your air is the air of a leisured man, wealthy in time, of aman from some planet where there are a hundred and twenty-four hoursa day instead of twenty-four. I am an impassioned reader of newspapers.I read five English and two French dailies, and the news-agents aloneknow how many weeklies, regularly. I am obliged to mention this personalfact lest I should be accused of a prejudice against newspapers when I saythat I object to the reading of newspapers in the morning train. Newspapersare produced with rapidity, to be read with rapidity. There is no place in mydaily 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 consecutiveminutes of wonderful solitude (for nowhere can one more perfectly immerseone's self in one's self than in a compartment full of silent, withdrawn, smokingmales) is to me repugnant. I cannot possibly allow you to scatter pricelesspearls 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. Nonewspaper reading in trains! I have already "put by" about three-quarters ofan hour for use.
Now you reach your office. And I abandon you there till six o'clock. I amaware 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. ButI will leave you all that to spend as you choose. You may read yournewspapers 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 understandthat you are tired. During the journey home you have been graduallyworking up the tired feeling. The tired feeling hangs heavy over themighty 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 littlenourishment. 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 iscreeping on; you take a stroll; you caress the piano.... By Jove! a quarterpast eleven. You then devote quite forty minutes to thinking about goingto bed; and it is conceivable that you are acquainted with a genuinely goodwhisky. 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 thestretch." Just so. But when you arrange to go to the theatre (especiallywith a pretty woman) what happens? You rush to the suburbs; you spareno toil to make yourself glorious in fine raiment; you rush back to town inanother 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-quartersof an hour in "thinking about" going to bed. You go. Friends and fatiguehave equally been forgotten, and the evening has seemed so exquisitelylong (or perhaps too short)! And do you remember that time when youwere persuaded to sing in the chorus of the amateur operatic society, andslaved two hours every other night for three months? Can you deny thatwhen you have something definite to look forward to at eventide, somethingthat is to employ all your energy--the thought of that something gives a glowand 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 thatyou are not tired (because you are not, you know), and that you arrange yourevening so that it is not cut in the middle by a meal. By so doing you willhave a clear expanse of at least three hours. I do not suggest that you shouldemploy 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 ahalf every other evening in some important and consecutive cultivation of themind. You will still be left with three evenings for friends, bridge, tennis,domestic scenes, odd reading, pipes, gardening, pottering, and prizecompetitions. You will still have the terrific wealth of forty-five hoursbetween 2 p.m. Saturday and 10 a.m. Monday. If you persevere you willsoon want to pass four evenings, and perhaps five, in some sustainedendeavour to be genuinely alive. And you will fall out of that habit ofmuttering to yourself at 11.15 p.m., "Time to be thinking about going tobed." The man who begins to go to bed forty minutes before he openshis bedroom door is bored; that is to say, he is not living.
But remember, at the start, those ninety nocturnal minutes thrice a weekmust be the most important minutes in the ten thousand and eighty. Theymust 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 tothe tennis club," you must say, "...but I have to work." This, I admit, isintensely difficult to say. Tennis is so much more urgent than the immortalsoul.