I have never taken any exercise, except sleeping and resting, and I
never intend to take any. Exercise is loathsome. And it cannot be any
benefit when you are tired; and I was always tired. But let another
person try my way, and see where he will come out. I desire now to
repeat and emphasise that maxim: We can't reach old age by another man's
road. My habits protect my life, but they would assassinate you.
I have lived a severely moral life. But it would be a mistake for other
people to try that, or for me to recommend it. Very few would succeed:
you have to have a perfectly colossal stock of morals; and you can't get
them on a margin; you have to have the whole thing, and put them in your
box. Morals are an acquirement—like music, like a foreign language, like
piety, poker, paralysis—no man is born with them. I wasn't myself, I
started poor. I hadn't a single moral. There is hardly a man in this
house that is poorer than I was then. Yes, I started like that—the world
before me, not a moral in the slot. Not even an insurance moral. I can
remember the first one I ever got. I can remember the landscape, the
weather, the—I can remember how everything looked. It was an old moral,
an old second-hand moral, all out of repair, and didn't fit, anyway. But
if you are careful with a thing like that, and keep it in a dry place,
and save it for processions, and Chautauquas, and World's Fairs, and so
on, and disinfect it now and then, and give it a fresh coat of whitewash
once in a while, you will be surprised to see how well she will last and
how long she will keep sweet, or at least inoffensive. When I got
that mouldy old moral, she had stopped growing, because she hadn't any
exercise; but I worked her hard, I worked her Sundays and all. Under
this cultivation she waxed in might and stature beyond belief, and
served me well and was my pride and joy for sixty-three years; then
she got to associating with insurance presidents, and lost flesh and
character, and was a sorrow to look at and no longer competent for
business. She was a great loss to me. Yet not all loss. I sold her—ah,
pathetic skeleton, as she was—I sold her to Leopold, the pirate King of
Belgium; he sold her to our Metropolitan Museum, and it was very glad to
get her, for without a rag on, she stands 57 feet long and 16 feet high,
and they think she's a brontosaur. Well, she looks it. They believe it
will take nineteen geological periods to breed her match.
Morals are of inestimable value, for every man is born crammed with sin
microbes, and the only thing that can extirpate these sin microbes
is morals. Now you take a sterilized Christian—I mean, you take the
sterilized Christian, for there's only one. Dear sir, I wish you
wouldn't look at me like that.
Threescore years and ten!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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