Nevertheless, I admit that the minority is of sufficient importance to
merit attention, and that I ought not to have ignored it so completely
as I did do. The whole difficulty of the hard-working minority was put
in a single colloquial sentence by one of my correspondents. He wrote:
"I am just as keen as anyone on doing something to 'exceed my
programme,' but allow me to tell you that when I get home at six thirty
p.m. I am not anything like so fresh as you seem to imagine."
Now I must point out that the case of the minority, who throw
themselves with passion and gusto into their daily business task, is
infinitely less deplorable than the case of the majority, who go
half-heartedly and feebly through their official day. The former are
less in need of advice "how to live." At any rate during their
official day of, say, eight hours they are really alive; their engines
are giving the full indicated "h.p." The other eight working hours of
their day may be badly organised, or even frittered away; but it is
less disastrous to waste eight hours a day than sixteen hours a day; it
is better to have lived a bit than never to have lived at all. The real
tragedy is the tragedy of the man who is braced to effort neither in
the office nor out of it, and to this man this book is primarily
addressed. "But," says the other and more fortunate man, "although my
ordinary programme is bigger than his, I want to exceed my programme
too! I am living a bit; I want to live more. But I really can't do
another day's work on the top of my official day."
The fact is, I, the author, ought to have foreseen that I should appeal
most strongly to those who already had an interest in existence. It is
always the man who has tasted life who demands more of it. And it is
always the man who never gets out of bed who is the most difficult to
rouse.
Well, you of the minority, let us assume that the intensity of your
daily money-getting will not allow you to carry out quite all the
suggestions in the following pages. Some of the suggestions may yet
stand. I admit that you may not be able to use the time spent on the
journey home at night; but the suggestion for the journey to the office
in the morning is as practicable for you as for anybody. And that
weekly interval of forty hours, from Saturday to Monday, is yours just
as much as the other man's, though a slight accumulation of fatigue may
prevent you from employing the whole of your "h.p." upon it. There
remains, then, the important portion of the three or more evenings a
week. You tell me flatly that you are too tired to do anything outside
your programme at night. In reply to which I tell you flatly that if
your ordinary day's work is thus exhausting, then the balance of your
life is wrong and must be adjusted. A man's powers ought not to be
monopolised by his ordinary day's work. What, then, is to be done?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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