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Page 7
What? You say that full energy given to those sixteen hours will
lessen the value of the business eight? Not so. On the contrary,
it will assuredly increase the value of the business eight. One of
the chief things which my typical man has to learn is that the
mental faculties are capable of a continuous hard activity; they do
not tire like an arm or a leg. All they want is change--not rest,
except in sleep.
I shall now examine the typical man's current method of employing
the sixteen hours that are entirely his, beginning with his
uprising. I will merely indicate things which he does and which I
think he ought not to do, postponing my suggestions for "planting"
the times which I shall have cleared--as a settler clears spaces in
a forest.
In justice to him I must say that he wastes very little time before
he leaves the house in the morning at 9.10. In too many houses he
gets up at nine, breakfasts between 9.7 and 9.9 1/2, and then bolts.
But immediately he bangs the front door his mental faculties, which
are tireless, become idle. He walks to the station in a condition
of mental coma. Arrived there, he usually has to wait for the
train. On hundreds of suburban stations every morning you see men
calmly strolling up and down platforms while railway companies
unblushingly rob them of time, which is more than money. Hundreds
of thousands of hours are thus lost every day simply because my
typical man thinks so little of time that it has never occurred to
him to take quite easy precautions against the risk of its loss.
He has a solid coin of time to spend every day--call it a sovereign.
He must get change for it, and in getting change he is content to
lose heavily.
Supposing that in selling him a ticket the company said, "We will
change you a sovereign, but we shall charge you three halfpence for
doing so," what would my typical man exclaim? Yet that is the
equivalent of what the 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?
V
TENNIS AND THE IMMORTAL SOUL
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!
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