The Human Machine | Page 4

of us to be
professionals at living!
When we have been engaged in the preliminaries to living for about
fifty-five years, we begin to think about slacking off. Up till this period
our reason for not having scientifically studied the art of living--the
perfecting and use of the finer parts of the machine--is not that we have
lacked leisure (most of us have enormous heaps of leisure), but that we
have simply been too absorbed in the preliminaries, have, in fact,
treated the preliminaries to the business as the business itself. Then at
fifty-five we ought at last to begin to live our lives with professional
skill, as a professional painter paints pictures. Yes, but we can't. It is
too late then. Neither painters, nor acrobats, nor any professionals can
be formed at the age of fifty-five. Thus we finish our lives amateurishly,
as we have begun them. And when the machine creaks and sets our
teeth on edge, or refuses to obey the steering-wheel and deposits us in
the ditch, we say: 'Can't be helped!' or 'Doesn't matter! It will be all the
same a hundred years hence!' or: 'I must make the best of things.' And
we try to believe that in accepting the status quo we have justified the
status quo, and all the time we feel our insincerity.
You exclaim that I exaggerate. I do. To force into prominence an aspect
of affairs usually overlooked, it is absolutely necessary to exaggerate.
Poetic licence is one name for this kind of exaggeration. But I
exaggerate very little indeed, much less than perhaps you think. I know
that you are going to point out to me that vast numbers of people
regularly spend a considerable portion of their leisure in striving after
self-improvement. Granted! And I am glad of it. But I should be

gladder if their strivings bore more closely upon the daily business of
living, of self-expression without friction and without futile desires.
See this man who regularly studies every evening of his life! He has
genuinely understood the nature of poetry, and his taste is admirable.
He recites verse with true feeling, and may be said to be highly
cultivated. Poetry is a continual source of pleasure to him. True! But
why is he always complaining about not receiving his deserts in the
office? Why is he worried about finance? Why does he so often sulk
with his wife? Why does he persist in eating more than his digestion
will tolerate? It was not written in the book of fate that he should
complain and worry and sulk and suffer. And if he was a professional
at living he would not do these things. There is no reason why he
should do them, except the reason that he has never learnt his business,
never studied the human machine as a whole, never really thought
rationally about living. Supposing you encountered an automobilist
who was swerving and grinding all over the road, and you stopped to
ask what was the matter, and he replied: 'Never mind what's the matter.
Just look at my lovely acetylene lamps, how they shine, and how I've
polished them!' You would not regard him as a Clifford-Earp, or even
as an entirely sane man. So with our student of poetry. It is indubitable
that a large amount of what is known as self-improvement is simply
self-indulgence--a form of pleasure which only incidentally improves a
particular part of the machine, and even that to the neglect of far more
important parts.
My aim is to direct a man's attention to himself as a whole, considered
as a machine, complex and capable of quite extraordinary efficiency,
for travelling through this world smoothly, in any desired manner, with
satisfaction not only to himself but to the people he meets en route, and
the people who are overtaking him and whom he is overtaking. My aim
is to show that only an inappreciable fraction of our ordered and
sustained efforts is given to the business of actual living, as
distinguished from the preliminaries to living.

III

THE BRAIN AS A GENTLEMAN-AT-LARGE
It is not as if, in this business of daily living, we were seriously
hampered by ignorance either as to the results which we ought to obtain,
or as to the general means which we must employ in order to obtain
them. With all our absorption in the mere preliminaries to living, and
all our carelessness about living itself, we arrive pretty soon at a fairly
accurate notion of what satisfactory living is, and we perceive with
some clearness the methods necessary to success. I have pictured the
man who wakes up in the middle of the night and sees the horrid
semi-fiasco of his life. But let me picture the man who wakes up