How to Live on 24 Hours a Day | Page 7

one of uneasiness, of
expectation, of looking forward, of aspiration. It is a source of constant discomfort, for it
behaves like a skeleton at the feast of all our enjoyments. We go to the theatre and laugh;

but between the acts it raises a skinny finger at us. We rush violently for the last train,
and while we are cooling a long age on the platform waiting for the last train, it
promenades its bones up and down by our side and inquires: "O man, what hast thou
done with thy youth? What art thou doing with thine age?" You may urge that this feeling
of continuous looking forward, of aspiration, is part of life itself, and inseparable from
life itself. True!
But there are degrees. A man may desire to go to Mecca. His conscience tells him that he
ought to go to Mecca. He fares forth, either by the aid of Cook's, or unassisted; he may
probably never reach Mecca; he may drown before he gets to Port Said; he may perish
ingloriously on the coast of the Red Sea; his desire may remain eternally frustrate.
Unfulfilled aspiration may always trouble him. But he will not be tormented in the same
way as the man who, desiring to reach Mecca, and harried by the desire to reach Mecca,
never leaves Brixton.
It is something to have left Brixton. Most of us have not left Brixton. We have not even
taken a cab to Ludgate Circus and inquired from Cook's the price of a conducted tour.
And our excuse to ourselves is that there are only twenty-four hours in the day.
If we further analyse our vague, uneasy aspiration, we shall, I think, see that it springs
from a fixed idea that we ought to do something in addition to those things which we are
loyally and morally obliged to do. We are obliged, by various codes written and
unwritten, to maintain ourselves and our families (if any) in health and comfort, to pay
our debts, to save, to increase our prosperity by increasing our efficiency. A task
sufficiently difficult! A task which very few of us achieve! A task often beyond our skill!
yet, if we succeed in it, as we sometimes do, we are not satisfied; the skeleton is still with
us.
And even when we realise tat the task is beyond our skill, that our powers cannot cope
with it, we feel that we should be less discontented if we gave to our powers, already
overtaxed, something still further to do.
And such is, indeed, the fact. The wish to accomplish something outside their formal
programme is common to all men who in the course of evolution have risen past a certain
level.
Until an effort is made to satisfy that wish, the sense of uneasy waiting for something to
start which has not started will remain to disturb the peace of the soul. That wish has been
called by many names. It is one form of the universal desire for knowledge. And it is so
strong that men whose whole lives have been given to the systematic acquirement of
knowledge have been driven by it to overstep the limits of their programme in search of
still more knowledge. Even Herbert Spencer, in my opinion the greatest mind that ever
lived, was often forced by it into agreeable little backwaters of inquiry.
I imagine that in the majority of people who are conscious of the wish to live--that is to
say, people who have intellectual curiosity--the aspiration to exceed formal programmes
takes a literary shape. They would like to embark on a course of reading. Decidedly the

British people are becoming more and more literary. But I would point out that literature
by no means comprises the whole field of knowledge, and that the disturbing thirst to
improve one's self--to increase one's knowledge--may well be slaked quite apart from
literature. With the various ways of slaking I shall deal later. Here I merely point out to
those who have no natural sympathy with literature that literature is not the only well.
III
PRECAUTIONS BEFORE BEGINNING
Now that I have succeeded (if succeeded I have) in persuading you to admit to yourself
that you are constantly haunted by a suppressed dissatisfaction with your own
arrangement of your daily life; and that the primal cause of that inconvenient
dissatisfaction is the feeling that you are every day leaving undone something which you
would like to do, and which, indeed, you are always hoping to do when you have "more
time"; and now that I have drawn your attention to the glaring, dazzling truth that you
never will have "more time," since you already have all the time there is--you expect me
to let you into some wonderful secret by which