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
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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