The Quest of the Simple Life | Page 3

odds for and against myself on such trifles as
these, and even went so far as to keep an account of my successes and
my failures. Thus, for a whole month I was interested in a person quite
unknown to me, who wore an obsolete white beaver hat, appeared
punctually at the corner of Bond Street at half-past five in the afternoon,
and spent half an hour in turning over the odd volumes displayed on the
street board of a secondhand-book shop not far from Oxford Circus.
His appearances were so planetary in their regularity that one might
have reckoned time by them. Who he was, or what his objects in life
may have been, I never learned. I never saw him walk but in the one
direction; I never saw him buy one of the many books which he
examined: perhaps he also was afflicted with the tedium of London,
and took this singular way of getting through a portion of his sterile day
with a simulated interest. At all events he afforded me an interest, and
when he vanished at the end of the month, Oxford Street once more
became intolerable to me.
These particulars appear so foolish and so trivial that most persons will
find them ridiculous, and even the most sympathetic will perhaps
wonder why they are recorded. They were, however, far from trivial to
me. The marooned seaman saves his sanity by cutting notches in a stick,
the solitary prisoner by friendship with a mouse; and when life is
reduced to the last exiguity of narrowness, the interests of life will be
narrow too. No writer, whose work is familiar to me, has ever yet
described with unsparing fidelity the kind of misery which lies in
having to do precisely the same things at the same hour, through long
and consecutive periods of time. The hours then become a dead weight
which oppresses the spirit to the point of torture. Life itself resembles
those dreadful dreams of childhood, in which we see the ceiling and the
walls of the room contract round one's helpless and immobile form.
Blessed is he who has variety in his life: thrice blessed is he who has

both freedom and variety: but the subordinate toiler in the vast
mechanism of a great city has neither. He will sit at the same desk, gaze
upon the same unending rows of figures, do, in fact, the same things
year in and year out till his youth has withered into age. He himself
becomes little better than a mechanism. There is no form of outdoor
employment of which this can be said. The life of the agricultural
labourer, so often pitied for its monotony, is variety itself compared
with the life of the commercial clerk. The labourer's tasks are at least
changed by the seasons; but time brings no such diversion to the clerk.
It is this horrible monotony which so often makes the clerk a
foul-minded creature; driven in upon himself, he has to create some
kind of drama for his instincts and imaginations, and often from the
sorriest material. When I played single-handed cribbage with the few
trivial interests which I knew, I at least took an innocent diversion; and
I may claim that my absurd fancies injured no one, and were certainly
of some service to myself.
The outsider usually imagines that great cities afford unusual
opportunities of social intercourse, and when I first became a citizen I
found this prospect enchanting. I scanned the horizon eagerly for these
troops of friends which a city was supposed to furnish: quested here
and there for a responsive pair of eyes; made timid approaches which
were repulsed; and, finally, after much experiment, had to admit that
the whole idea was a delusion. No doubt it is true enough that, with a
settled and considerable income, and the power of entertaining, friends
are to be found in plenty. But Grosvenor Square and Kentish Town do
not so much as share a common atmosphere. In the one it is a pleasant
tradition that the house door should be set wide to all comers who can
contribute anything to the common social stock; in the other, the house
door is jealously locked and barred. The London clerk does not care to
reveal the shifts and the bareness of his domestic life. He will reside in
one locality for years without so much as seeking to know his
next-door neighbour. He will live on cordial terms with his comrade in
the office, but will never dream of inviting him to his home. His
instinct of privacy is so abnormal that it becomes mere churlishness.
His wife, if he have one, usually fosters this spirit for reasons of her
own. Her interests end with the clothing and education