The Plain Man and His Wife | Page 9

is rare because it demands that
one shall always be able to distinguish between the man one thinks one
ought to be and the man one actually is. And it is rare because it
demands impartial detachment and a certain quality of fine
shamelessness--the shamelessness which confesses openly to oneself
and finds a legitimate pleasure in confessing. By way of compensation
for its difficulty, the pursuit of self-knowledge happens to be one of the
most entrancing of all pursuits, as those who have seriously practised it
are well aware. Its interest is inexhaustible and grows steadily.
Unhappily, the Anglo-Saxon racial temperament is inimical to it. The
Latins like it better. To feel its charm one should listen to a
highly-cultivated Frenchman analysing himself for the benefit of an
intimate companion. Still, even Anglo-Saxons may try it with
advantage.
The branch of self-knowledge which is particularly required for the
solution of the immediate case of the plain man now under
consideration is not a very hard one. It does not involve the recognition
of crimes or even of grave faults. It is simply the knowledge of what
interests him and what bores him.

Let him enter upon the first section of it with candour. Let him be
himself. And let him be himself without shame. Let him ever remember
that it is not a sin to be bored by what interests others, or to be
interested in what bores others. Let him in this private inquiry give his
natural instincts free play, for it is precisely the gradual suppression of
his natural instincts which has brought him to his present pass. At first
he will probably murmur in a fatigued voice that he cannot think of
anything at all that interests him. Then let him dig down among his
buried instincts. Let him recall his bright past of dreams, before he had
become a victim imprisoned in the eternal groove. Everybody has, or
has had, a secret desire, a hidden leaning. Let him discover what his is,
or was--gardening, philosophy, reading, travel, billiards, raising
animals, training animals, killing animals, yachting, collecting pictures
or postage-stamps or autographs or snuff-boxes or scalps, astronomy,
kite-flying, house-furnishing, foreign languages, cards, swimming,
diary-keeping, the stage, politics, carpentry, riding or driving, music,
staying up late, getting up early, tree-planting, tree-felling,
town-planning, amateur soldiering, statics, entomology, botany,
elocution, children-fancying, cigar-fancying, wife-fancying, placid
domestic evenings, conjuring, bacteriology, thought-reading,
mechanics, geology, sketching, bell-ringing, theosophy, his own soul,
even golf....
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