Kitabı oku: «The Art of Living», sayfa 8

The Use of Time

I

I brought Rogers home with me again the other day. I do not mean Rogers in the flesh; but the example of Rogers as a bogy with which to confound my better half and myself. You may recall that Rogers is the book-keeper for Patterson the banker, and that he has brought up and educated a family on a salary of twenty-two hundred dollars a year.

“Barbara,” said I, “we were reflecting yesterday that we never have time to do the things we really wish to do. Have you ever considered how Rogers spends his time?”

My wife admitted that she had not, and she dutifully waited for me to proceed, though I could tell from the expression of her mouth that she did not expect to derive much assistance from the example of Mr. Rogers. Therefore I made an interesting pathological deduction to begin with.

“Rogers does not live on his nerves from one year’s end to the other, as we do.”

“I congratulate him,” said Barbara, with a sigh.

“And yet,” I continued, “he leads a highly respectable and fairly interesting life. He gets up at precisely the same hour every morning, has his breakfast, reads the paper, and is at his desk punctually on time. He dines frugally, returns to his desk until half-past four or five, and after performing any errands which Mrs. Rogers has asked him to attend to, goes home to the bosom of his family. There he exchanges his coat and boots for a dressing-gown, or aged smoking-jacket, and slippers, and remains by his fireside absorbed in the evening paper until tea-time. Conversation with the members of his family beguiles him for half an hour after the completion of the meal; then he settles down to the family weekly magazine, or plays checkers or backgammon with his wife or daughters. After a while, if he is interested in ferns or grasses, he looks to see how his specimens are growing under the glass case in the corner. He pats the cat and makes sure that the canary is supplied with seed. Now and then he brings home a puzzle, like ‘Pigs in Clover,’ which keeps him up half an hour later than usual, but ordinarily his head is nodding before the stroke of ten warns him that his bed-hour has come. And just at the time that the wife of his employer, Patterson, may be setting out for a ball, he is tucking himself up in bed by the side of Mrs. Rogers.”

“Poor man!” interjected Barbara.

“He has his diversions,” said I. “Now and again neighbors drop in for a chat, and the evening is wound up with a pitcher of lemonade and angel-cake. He and his wife drop in, in their turn, or he goes to a political caucus. Once a fortnight comes the church sociable, and every now and then a wedding. From time to time he and Mrs. Rogers attend lectures. His young people entertain their friends, as the occasion offers, in a simple way, and on Sunday he goes to church in the morning and falls to sleep after a heavy dinner in the afternoon. He leads a quiet, peaceful, conservative existence, unharassed by social functions and perpetual excitement.”

“And he prides himself, I dare say,” said Barbara, “on the score of its virtuousness. He saves his nerves and he congratulates himself that he is not a society person, as he calls it. Your Mr. Rogers may be a very estimable individual, dear, in his own sphere, and I do think he manages wonderfully on his twenty-two hundred dollars a year; but I should prefer to see you lose your nerves and become a gibbering victim of nervous prostration rather than that you should imitate him.”

“I’m not proposing to imitate him, Barbara,” I answered, gravely. “I admit that his life seems rather dull and not altogether inspiring, but I do think that a little of his repose would be beneficial to many of us whose interests are more varied. We might borrow it to advantage for a few months in the year, don’t you think so? I believe, Barbara, that if you and I were each of us to lie flat on our backs for one hour every day and think of nothing – and not even clinch our hands – we should succeed in doing more things than we really wish to do.”

“I suppose it’s the climate – they say it’s the climate,” said Barbara, pensively. “Foreigners don’t seem to be affected in that way. They’re not always in a hurry as we are, and yet they seem to accomplish very nearly as much. We all know what it is to be conscious of that dreadful, nervous, hurried feeling, even when we have plenty of time to do the things we have to do. I catch myself walking fast – racing, in fact – when there is not the least need of it. I don’t clinch my hands nearly so much as I used, and I’ve ceased to hold on to the pillow in bed as though it were a life-preserver, out of deference to Delsarte, but when it comes to lying down flat on my back for an hour a day – every day – really it isn’t feasible. It’s an ideal plan, I dare say, but the days are not long enough. Just take to-day, for instance, and tell me, please, when I had time to lie down.”

“You are clinching your hands now,” I remarked.

“Because you have irritated me with your everlasting Mr. Rogers,” retorted Barbara. She examined, nevertheless, somewhat dejectedly, the marks of her nails in her palms. “In the morning, for instance, when I came down to breakfast there was the mail. Two dinner invitations and an afternoon tea; two sets of wedding-cards, and a notice of a lecture by Miss Clara Hatheway on the relative condition of primary schools here and abroad; requests for subscriptions to the new Cancer Hospital and the Children’s Fresh Air and Vacation Fund; an advertisement of an after-holiday sale of boys’ and girls’ clothes at Halliday’s; a note from Mrs. James Green asking particulars regarding our last cook, and a letter from the President of my Woman’s Club notifying me that I was expected to talk to them at the next meeting on the arguments in favor of and against the ownership by cities and towns of gas and water-works. All these had to be answered, noted, or considered. Then I had to interview the cook and the butcher and the grocer about the dinner, give orders that a button should be sewn on one pair of your trousers and a stain removed from another, and give directions to the chore-man to oil the lock of the front-door, and tell him to go post-haste for the plumber to extract the blotting-paper which the children yesterday stuffed down the drain-pipe in the bath-tub, so that the water could not escape. Then I had to sit down and read the newspaper. Not because I had time, or wished to, but to make sure that there was nothing in it which you could accuse me of not having read. After this I dressed to go out. I stopped at the florist’s to order some roses for Mrs. Julius Cæsar, whose mother is dead; at Hapgood & Wales’s and at Jones’s for cotton-batting, hooks and eyes, and three yards of ribbon; at Belcher’s for an umbrella to replace mine, which you left in the cable-cars, and at the library to select something to read. I arrived home breathless for the children’s dinner, and immediately afterward I dressed and went to the meeting of the Executive Committee of the Woman’s Club, stopping on the way to inquire if Mrs. Wilson’s little boy were better. We started by discussing a proposed change in our Constitution regarding the number of black-balls necessary to exclude a candidate, and drifted off on to ‘Trilby.’ It was nearly five when I got away, and as I felt it on my conscience to go both to Mrs. Southwick’s and Mrs. Williams’s teas, I made my appearance at each for a few minutes, but managed to slip away so as to be at home at six. When you came in I had just been reading to the children and showing them about their lessons. Now I have only just time to dress for dinner, for we dine at the Gregory Browns, at half-past seven. We ought to go later to the reception at Mrs. Hollis’s – it is her last of three and we haven’t been yet – but I suppose you will say you are too tired. There! will you tell me when I could have found time to lie down for an hour to-day?”

I was constrained to laugh at my wife’s recital, and I was not able at the moment to point out to her exactly what she might have omitted from her category so as to make room for the hour of repose. Nor, indeed, as I review the events of my own daily life and of the daily lives of my friends and acquaintances, am I able to define precisely where it could be brought in. And yet are we not – many of us who are in the thick of modern life – conscious that our days are, as it were, congested? We feel sure that so far as our physical comfort is concerned we ought to be doing less, and we shrewdly suspect that, if we had more time in which to think, our spiritual natures would be the gainers. The difficulty is to stop, or rather to reduce the speed of modern living to the point at which these high-pressure nervous symptoms disappear, and the days cease to seem too short for what we wish to accomplish. Perhaps those who take an intense interest in living will never be able to regain that delightful condition of equipoise, if it ever existed, which our ancestors both here and across the water are said to have experienced. Perhaps, too, our ancestors were more in a hurry when they were alive than they seem to have been now that they are dead; but, whether this be true or otherwise, we are confidently told by those who ought to know that we Americans of this day and generation are the most restless, nervous people under the sun, and live at a higher pressure than our contemporaries of the effete civilizations. It used to be charged that we were in such haste to grow rich that there was no health in us; and now that we are, or soon will be, the wealthiest nation in the world, they tell us that we continue to maintain the same feverish pace in all that we undertake or do.

I am not sure that this charge could not be brought against the Englishman, Frenchman, or German of to-day with almost equal justice, or, in other words, that it is a characteristic of the age rather than of our nation; but that conviction would merely solace our pride and could not assuage “that tired feeling” of which so many are conscious. At all events, if we do not work harder than our kinsmen across the sea, we seem to bear the strain less well. It may be the climate, as my wife has said, which causes our nervous systems to rebel; but then, again, we cannot change the climate, and consequently must adapt ourselves to its idiosyncrasies.

Ever since we first began to declare that we were superior to all other civilizations we have been noted for our energy. The way in which we did everything, from sawing wood to electing a President, was conspicuous by virtue of the bustling, hustling qualities displayed. But it is no longer high treason to state that our national life, in spite of its bustle, was, until comparatively recently, lacking in color and variety. The citizen who went to bed on the stroke of ten every night and did practically the same thing each day from one year’s end to the other was the ideal citizen of the Republic, and was popularly described as a conservative and a strong man. His life was led within very repressed limits, and anything more artistic than a chromo or religious motto was apt to irritate him and shock his principles. To be sure, we had then our cultivated class – more narrowly but possibly more deeply cultivated than its flourishing successor of to-day – but the average American, despite his civic virtues and consciousness of rectitude, led a humdrum existence, however hustling or bustling. There is a large percentage of our population that continues to live in much the same manner, notwithstanding the wave of enlightenment which has swept over the country and keyed us all up to concert pitch by multiplying the number of our interests. I feel a little guilty in having included Rogers among this number, for I really know of my own knowledge nothing about his individual home life. It may be that I have been doing him a rank injustice, and that his home is in reality a seething caldron of progress. I referred to him as a type rather than as an individual, knowing as I do that there are still too many homes in this country where music, art, literature, social tastes, and intelligent interest in human affairs in the abstract, when developed beyond mere rudimentary lines, are unappreciated and regarded as vanities or inanities.

On the other hand, there is nothing more interesting in our present national evolution than the eager recognition by the intelligent and aspiring portion of the people that we have been and are ignorant, and that the true zest of life lies in its many-sidedness and its possibilities of development along æsthetic, social, and intellectual as well as moral lines. The United States to-day is fairly bristling with eager, ambitious students, and with people of both sexes, young and middle-aged, who are anxiously seeking how to make the most of life. This eagerness of soul is not confined to any social class, and is noticeable in every section of the country in greater or less degree. It is quite as likely to be found among people of very humble means as among those whose earliest associations have brought them into contact with the well-to-do and carefully educated. Therefore I beg the pardon of Rogers in case I have put him individually in the wrong category. A divine yet cheery activity has largely taken the place of sodden self-righteousness on the one hand, and analytical self-consciousness on the other. The class is not as yet very large as compared with the entire population of the country, but it is growing rapidly, and its members are the most interesting men and women of the Republic – those who are in the van of our development as a people.

Overcrowded and congested lives signify at least earnestness and absorption. Human nature is more likely to aspire and advance when society is nervously active, than when it is bovine and self-congratulatory. But nerves can endure only a certain amount of strain without reminding human beings that strong and healthy bodies are essential to true national progress. Only recently in this country have we learned to consider the welfare of the body, and though we have begun to be deadly in earnest about athletics, the present generation of workers was, for the most part, brought up on the theory that flesh and blood was a limitation rather than a prerequisite. We are doing bravely in this matter so far as the education of our children is concerned, but it is too late to do much for our own nerves. Though stagnation is a more deplorable state, it behooves us, nevertheless, if possible, to rid ourselves of congestion for our ultimate safety.

An active man or woman stopping to think in the morning may well be appalled at the variety of his or her life. The ubiquity of the modern American subconsciousness is something unique. We wish to know everything there is to know. We are interested not merely in our own and our neighbors’ affairs – with a knowledge of which so many citizens of other lands are peacefully contented – but we are eager to know, and to know with tolerable accuracy, what is going on all over the world – in England, China, Russia, and Australia. Not merely politically, but socially, artistically, scientifically, philosophically, and ethically. No subject is too technical for our interest, provided it comes in our way, whether it concern the canals in Mars or the antitoxin germ. The newspaper and the telegraph have done much to promote this ubiquity of the mind’s eye all over the world, but the interests of the average American are much wider and more diversified than those of any other people. An Englishman will have his hobbies and know them thoroughly, but regarding affairs beyond the pale of his limited inquiry he is deliberately and often densely ignorant. He reads, and reads augustly, one newspaper, one or two magazines – a few books; we, on the other hand, are not content unless we stretch out feelers in many directions and keep posted, as we call it, by hasty perusals of almost innumerable publications for fear lest something escape us. What does the Frenchman – the average intelligent Frenchman – know or care about the mode of our Presidential elections, and whether this Republican or that Democrat has made or marred his political reputation? We feel that we require to inform ourselves not only concerning the art and literature of France, but to have the names and doings of her statesmen at our fingers’ ends for use in polite conversation, and the satisfaction of the remains of the New England conscience. All this is highly commendable, if it does not tend to render us superficial. The more knowledge we have, the better, provided we do not fall into the slough of knowing nothing very well, or hunt our wits to death by over-acquisitiveness. There is so much nowadays to learn, and seemingly so little time in which to learn it, we cannot afford to spread ourselves too thin.

The energy of our people has always been conspicuous in the case of women. The American woman, from the earliest days of our history, has refused to be prevented by the limitations of time or physique from trying to include the entire gamut of human feminine activity in her daily experience. There was a period when she could demonstrate successfully her ability to cook, sweep, rear and educate children, darn her husband’s stockings, and yet entertain delightfully, dress tastefully, and be well versed in literature and all the current phases of high thinking. The New England woman of fifty years ago was certainly an interesting specimen from this point of view, in spite of her morbid conscience and polar sexual proclivities. But among the well-to-do women of the nation to-day – the women who correspond socially to those just described – this achievement is possible only by taxing the human system to the point of distress, except in the newly or thinly settled portions of the country, where the style of living is simple and primitive.

In the East, of course, in the cities and towns the women in question ceased long ago to do all the housework; and among the well-to-do, servants have relieved her of much, if not of all of the physical labor. But, on the other hand, the complexities of our modern establishments, and the worry which her domestics cause her, make the burden of her responsibilities fully equal to what they were when she cooked flap-jacks and darned stockings herself. In other countries the women conversant with literature, art, and science, who go in for philanthropy, photography, or the ornamentation of china, who write papers on sociological or educational matters, are, for the most part, women of leisure in other respects. The American woman is the only woman at large in the universe who aims to be the wife and mother of a family, the mistress of an establishment, a solver of world problems, a social leader, and a philanthropist or artistic devotee at one and the same time. Each of these interests has its determined followers among the women of other civilizations, but nowhere except here does the eternal feminine seek to manifest itself in so many directions in the same individual.

This characteristic of our womanhood is a virtue up to a certain point. The American woman has certainly impressed her theory that her sex should cease to be merely pliant, credulous, and ignorantly complacent so forcibly on the world that society everywhere has been affected by it. Her desire to make the most of herself, and to participate as completely as possible in the vital work of the world without neglecting the duties allotted to her by the older civilizations, is in the line of desirable evolution. But there is such a thing as being superficial, which is far more to be dreaded than even nervous prostration. Those absorbed in the earnest struggle of modern living may perhaps justly claim that to work until one drops is a noble fault, and that disregard of one’s own sensations and comfort is almost indispensable in order to accomplish ever so little. But there is nothing noble in superficiality; and it would seem that the constant flitting from one interest to another, which so many American women seem unable to avoid, must necessarily tend to prevent them from knowing or doing anything thoroughly.

As regards the creature man, the critics of this country have been accustomed to assert that he was so much absorbed in making money, or in business, as our popular phrase is, that he had no time for anything else. This accusation used to be extraordinarily true, and in certain parts of the country it has not altogether ceased to be true; though even there the persistent masculine dollar-hunter regards wistfully and proudly the æsthetic propensities of the female members of his family, and feels that his labors are sweetened thereby. This is a very different attitude from the self-sufficiency of half a century ago. The difficulty now is that our intelligent men, like our women, are apt to attempt too much, inclined to crowd into each and every day more sensations than they can assimilate. An Englishwoman, prominent in educational matters, and intelligent withal, recently expressed her surprise to my wife, Barbara, that the American gentleman existed. She had been long familiar with the American woman as a charming, if original, native product, but she had never heard of the American gentleman – meaning thereby the alert, thoughtful man of high purposes and good-breeding. “How many there are!” the Briton went on to say in the enthusiasm of her surprise. Indeed there are. The men prominent in the leading walks of life all over this country now compare favorably, at least, with the best of other nations, unless it be that our intense desire to know everything has rendered, or may render, us accomplished rather than profound.