The Angel and the Author | Page 7

the creature of the imagination. Say to yourselves, 'I am eating

saveloys,' and for all practical purposes these things will be saveloys."
Some of the lads professed to have done it, but one disappointed-
looking youth confessed to failure.
"But how can you be sure it was not a saveloy?" the host persisted.
"Because," explained the boy, "I haven't got the stomach-ache."
It appeared that saveloys, although a dish of which he was fond,
invariably and immediately disagreed with him. If only we were all
daemon and nothing else philosophy would be easier. Unfortunately,
there is more of us.
Another argument much approved by philosophy is that nothing
matters, because a hundred years hence, say, at the outside, we shall be
dead. What we really want is a philosophy that will enable us to get
along while we are still alive. I am not worrying about my centenary; I
am worrying about next quarter-day. I feel that if other people would
only go away, and leave me--income-tax collectors, critics, men who
come round about the gas, all those sort of people--I could be a
philosopher myself. I am willing enough to make believe that nothing
matters, but they are not. They say it is going to be cut off, and talk
about judgment summonses. I tell them it won't trouble any of us a
hundred years hence. They answer they are not talking of a hundred
years hence, but of this thing that was due last April twelvemonth.
They won't listen to my daemon. He does not interest them. Nor, to be
candid, does it comfort myself very much, this philosophical reflection
that a hundred years later on I'll be sure to be dead--that is, with
ordinary luck. What bucks me up much more is the hope that they will
be dead. Besides, in a hundred years things may have improved. I may
not want to be dead. If I were sure of being dead next morning, before
their threat of cutting off that water or that gas could by any possibility
be carried out, before that judgment summons they are bragging about
could be made returnable, I might--I don't say I should--be amused,
thinking how I was going to dish them. The wife of a very wicked man
visited him one evening in prison, and found him enjoying a supper of
toasted cheese.

"How foolish of you, Edward," argued the fond lady, "to be eating
toasted cheese for supper. You know it always affects your liver. All
day long to-morrow you will be complaining."
"No, I shan't," interrupted Edward; "not so foolish as you think me.
They are going to hang me to-morrow--early."
There is a passage in Marcus Aurelius that used to puzzle me until I hit
upon the solution. A foot-note says the meaning is obscure. Myself, I
had gathered this before I read the foot-note. What it is all about I defy
any human being to explain. It might mean anything; it might mean
nothing. The majority of students incline to the latter theory, though a
minority maintain there is a meaning, if only it could be discovered.
My own conviction is that once in his life Marcus Aurelius had a real
good time. He came home feeling pleased with himself without
knowing quite why.
"I will write it down," he said to himself, "now, while it is fresh in my
mind."
It seemed to him the most wonderful thing that anybody had ever said.
Maybe he shed a tear or two, thinking of all the good he was doing, and
later on went suddenly to sleep. In the morning he had forgotten all
about it, and by accident it got mixed up with the rest of the book. That
is the only explanation that seems to me possible, and it comforts me.
We are none of us philosophers all the time.
Philosophy is the science of suffering the inevitable, which most of us
contrive to accomplish without the aid of philosophy. Marcus Aurelius
was an Emperor of Rome, and Diogenes was a bachelor living rent free.
I want the philosophy of the bank clerk married on thirty shillings a
week, of the farm labourer bringing up a family of eight on a precarious
wage of twelve shillings. The troubles of Marcus Aurelius were chiefly
those of other people.
"Taxes will have to go up, I am afraid," no doubt he often sighed. "But,
after all, what are taxes? A thing in conformity with the nature of

man--a little thing that Zeus approves of, one feels sure. The daemon
within me says taxes don't really matter."
Maybe the paterfamilias of the period, who did the paying, worried
about new sandals for the children, his wife insisting she hadn't a frock
fit to be seen in at the amphitheatre; that,