Part 5

I mention a few of the ten million directions in which his secret desire may point or have pointed. I have probably not mentioned the right direction. But he can find it. He can perhaps find several right directions without too much trouble.

And now he says:

"I suppose you mean me to 'take up' one of these things?"

I do, seeing that he has hitherto neglected so clear a duty. If he had attended to it earlier, and with perseverance he would not be in the humiliating situation of exclaiming bitterly that he has no pleasure in life.

"But," he resists, "you know perfectly well that I have no time!"

To which I am obliged to make reply:

"My dear sir, it is not your wife you are talking to. Kindly be honest with me."

I admit that his business is very exhausting and exigent. For the sake of argument I will grant that he cannot safely give it an instant's less time than he is now giving it. But even so his business does not absorb at the outside more than seventy hours of the hundred and ten hours during which he is wide awake each week. The rest of the time he spends either in performing necessary acts in a tedious way or in performing acts which are not only tedious to him, but utterly unnecessary (for his own hypothesis is that he gets no pleasure out of life)--visiting, dinner-giving, cards, newspaper-reading, placid domestic evenings, evenings out, bar-lounging, sitting aimlessly around, dandifying himself, week-ending, theatres, classical concerts, literature, suburban train-travelling, staying up late, being in the swim, even golf. In whatever manner he is whittling away his leisure, it is the wrong manner, for the sole reason that it bores him. Moreover, all whittling of leisure is a mistake. Leisure, like work, should be organized, and it should be organized in large pieces.

The proper course clearly is to substitute acts which promise to be interesting for acts which have proved themselves to produce nothing but tedium, and to carry out the change with brains, in a business spirit. And the first essential is to recognize that something has definitely to go by the board.

He protests:

"But I do only the usual things--what everybody else does! And then it's time to go to bed."

The case, however, is his case, not everybody else's case. Why should he submit to everlasting boredom for the mere sake of acting like everybody else?

He continues in the same strain:

"But you are asking me to change my whole life--at my age!"

Nothing of the sort! I am only suggesting that he should begin to live.

And then finally he cries:

"It's too drastic. I haven't the pluck!"

Now we are coming to the real point.

The machinery of his volition, in all directions save one, has been clogged, through persistent neglect, due to over-specialization. His mind needs to be cleared, and it can be cleared--it will clear itself--if regular periods of repose are enforced upon it. As things are, it practically never gets a holiday from business. I do not mean that the plain man is always thinking about his business; but I mean that he is always liable to think about his business, that his business is always present in his mind, even if dormant there, and that at every opportunity, if the mind happens to be inactive, it sits up querulously and insists on attention. The man's mind is indeed rather like an unfortunate domestic servant who, though not always at work, is never off duty, never night or day free from the menace of a damnable electric bell; and it is as stale as that servant. His business is capable of ringing the bell when the man is eating his soup, when he is sitting alone with his wife on a warm summer evening, and especially when he wakes just before dawn to pity and praise himself.

But he defends the position:

"My business demands much reflection--constant watchfulness."

Well, in the first place, an enterprise which demands watchfulness day and night from the same individual is badly organized, and should be reorganized. It runs contrary to the common sense of Nature. And, in the second place, his defence is insincere. He does not submit to the eternal preoccupation because he thinks he ought, but simply because he cannot help it. How often, especially just before the dawn, has he not longed to be delivered from the perfectly futile preoccupation, so that he might go to sleep again--and failed to get free! How often, in the midst of some jolly gathering, has he not felt secretly desolate because the one tyrannic topic would run round and round in his mind, just like a clockwork mouse, accomplishing no useful end, and making impossible any genuine participation in the gaiety that environs him!

Instead of being necessary to the success of his business, this morbid preoccupation is positively detrimental to his business. He would think much more usefully, more powerfully, more creatively, about his business if during at least thirteen consecutive hours each day he never thought of it at all.

And there is still a further point in this connection. Let him imagine how delightful it must be for the people in the home which he has made, the loving people whom he loves and to whom in theory he is devoting his career, to feel continually that he only sees them obscurely through the haze emanating from his business! Why--worse!--even when he is sitting with his wife, he and she might as well be communicating with each other across a grille against which a turnkey is standing and listening to every word said! Let him imagine how flattering for her! She might be more flattered, at any rate more thrilled, if she knew that instead of thinking about his business he was thinking about another woman. Could he shut the front door every afternoon on his business, the effect would not only be beneficial upon it and upon him, but his wife would smile the warm smile of wisdom justified. Like most women, she has a firmer grasp of the essence of life than the man upon whom she is dependent. She knows with her heart (what he only knows with his brain) that business, politics, and "all that sort of thing" are secondary to real existence, the mere preliminaries of it. She would rejoice, in the blush of the compliment he was paying her, that he had at last begun to comprehend the ultimate values!

So far as I am aware, there is no patent device for suddenly gaining that control of the mind which will enable one to free it from an obsession such as the obsession of the plain man. The desirable end can, however, be achieved by slow degrees, and by an obvious method which contains naught of the miraculous. If the victim of the obsession will deliberately try to think of something else, or to think of nothing at all--every time he catches himself in the act of thinking about his business out of hours, he certainly will, sooner or later--probably in about a fortnight--cure the obsession, or at least get the upper hand of it. The treatment demands perseverance, but it emphatically does not demand an impossibly powerful effort. It is an affair of trifling pertinacious touches.

It is a treatment easier to practise during daylight, in company, when distractions are plentiful, than in the solitude of the night. Triumphantly to battle with an obsession at night, when the vitality is low and the egoism intensified, is extremely difficult. But the small persistent successes of the day will gradually have their indirect influence on the night. A great deal can also be done by simple resolute suggestion. Few persons seem to know--what is, nevertheless, a fact--that the most effective moment for making resolves is in the comatose calm which precedes going to sleep. The entire organism is then in a passive state, and more permanently receptive of the imprint of volition than at any other period of the twenty-four hours. If regularly at that moment the man says clearly and imperiously to himself, "I will not allow my business to preoccupy me at home; I will not allow my business to preoccupy me at home; I will not allow my business to preoccupy me at home," he will be astonished at the results; which results, by the way, are reached by subconscious and therefore unperceived channels whose workings we can only guess at.

And when the obsession is beaten, destroyed, he will find himself not merely fortified with the necessary pluck and initiative for importing a new interest into his existence. His instincts of their own accord will be asking for that interest, for they will have been set free.

In choosing a distraction--that is to say, in choosing a rival to his business--he should select some pursuit whose nature differs as much as possible from the nature of his business, and which will bring into activity another side of his character. If his business is monotonous, demanding care and solicitude rather than irregular intense efforts of the brain, then let his distraction be such as will make a powerful call upon his brain. But if, on the other hand, the course of his business runs in crises that string up the brain to its tightest strain, then let his distraction be a foolish and merry one. Many men fall into the error of assuming that their hobbies must be as dignified and serious as their vocations, though surely the example of the greatest philosophers ought to have taught them better! They seem to imagine that they should continually be improving themselves, in either body or mind. If they take up a sport, it is because the sport may improve their health. And if the hobby is intellectual it must needs be employed to improve their brain. The fact is that their conception of self-improvement is too narrow. In their restricted sense of the phrase, they possibly don't need improving; they possibly are already improved to the point of being a nuisance to their fellow-creatures; possibly what they need is worsening. In the broad and full sense of the phrase self-improvement, a course of self-worsening might improve them. I have known men--and everybody has known them--who would approach nearer to perfection if they could only acquire a little carelessness, a little absent-mindedness, a little illogicalness, a little irrational and infantile gaiety, a little unscrupulousness in the matter of the time of day. These considerations should be weighed before certain hobbies are dismissed as being unworthy of a plain man's notice.