V
You get into the morning train with your newspaper, and you calmly and majestically2 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 shipping3 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 consecutive4 minutes of wonderful solitude5 (for nowhere can one more perfectly6 immerse one's self in one's self than in a compartment7 full of silent, withdrawn8, smoking males) is to me repugnant. I cannot possibly allow you to scatter9 priceless pearls of time with such Oriental lavishness10. 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 nominally11 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 mighty12 suburbs of London like a virtuous13 and melancholy14 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 nourishment15. And you do. Then you smoke, seriously; you see friends; you potter; you play cards; you flirt16 with a book; you note that old age is creeping on; you take a stroll; you caress17 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, exhausted18 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 toil19 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 fatigue20 have equally been forgotten, and the evening has seemed so exquisitely21 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 vitality22 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 cultivation23 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 persevere24 you will soon want to pass four evenings, and perhaps five, in some sustained endeavour25 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 rehearsal26 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.
1 immortal [ɪˈmɔ:tl] 第7级 | |
adj.不朽的;永生的,不死的;神的 | |
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2 majestically [mə'dʒestɪklɪ] 第8级 | |
雄伟地; 庄重地; 威严地; 崇高地 | |
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3 shipping [ˈʃɪpɪŋ] 第8级 | |
n.船运(发货,运输,乘船) | |
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4 consecutive [kənˈsekjətɪv] 第7级 | |
adj.连续的,联贯的,始终一贯的 | |
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5 solitude [ˈsɒlɪtju:d] 第7级 | |
n. 孤独; 独居,荒僻之地,幽静的地方 | |
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6 perfectly [ˈpɜ:fɪktli] 第8级 | |
adv.完美地,无可非议地,彻底地 | |
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7 compartment [kəmˈpɑ:tmənt] 第7级 | |
n.卧车包房,隔间;分隔的空间 | |
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8 withdrawn [wɪðˈdrɔ:n] 第10级 | |
vt.收回;使退出;vi.撤退,退出 | |
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9 scatter [ˈskætə(r)] 第7级 | |
vt.撒,驱散,散开;散布/播;vi.分散,消散 | |
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10 lavishness ['lævɪʃnəs] 第7级 | |
n.浪费,过度 | |
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11 nominally ['nɒmɪnəlɪ] 第7级 | |
在名义上,表面地; 应名儿 | |
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12 mighty [ˈmaɪti] 第7级 | |
adj.强有力的;巨大的 | |
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13 virtuous [ˈvɜ:tʃuəs] 第9级 | |
adj.有品德的,善良的,贞洁的,有效力的 | |
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14 melancholy [ˈmelənkəli] 第8级 | |
n.忧郁,愁思;adj.令人感伤(沮丧)的,忧郁的 | |
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15 nourishment [ˈnʌrɪʃmənt] 第9级 | |
n.食物,营养品;营养情况 | |
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16 flirt [flɜ:t] 第7级 | |
vi.调情,挑逗,调戏;vt.挥动;忽然弹出;n.调情者,卖俏者 | |
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17 caress [kəˈres] 第7级 | |
vt./n.爱抚,抚摸 | |
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18 exhausted [ɪgˈzɔ:stɪd] 第8级 | |
adj.极其疲惫的,精疲力尽的 | |
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19 toil [tɔɪl] 第8级 | |
vi.辛劳工作,艰难地行动;n.苦工,难事 | |
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20 fatigue [fəˈti:g] 第7级 | |
n.疲劳,劳累 | |
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21 exquisitely [ekˈskwɪzɪtlɪ] 第7级 | |
adv.精致地;强烈地;剧烈地;异常地 | |
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22 vitality [vaɪˈtæləti] 第8级 | |
n.活力,生命力,效力 | |
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23 cultivation [ˌkʌltɪˈveɪʃn] 第8级 | |
n.耕作,培养,栽培(法),养成 | |
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24 persevere [ˌpɜ:sɪˈvɪə(r)] 第7级 | |
vi.坚持,坚忍,不屈不挠 | |
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