considering that we have to spend the whole of our lives in this human machine, considering that it is our sole means of contact and compromise with the rest of the world, we really do devote to it very little attention. when i say 'we,' i mean our inmost spirits, the instinctive part, the mystery within that exists. and when i say 'the human machine' i mean the brain and the body—and chiefly the brain. the expression of the soul by means of the brain and body is what we call the art of 'living.' we certainly do not learn this art at school to any appreciable extent. at school we are taught that it is necessary to fling our arms and legs to and fro for so many hours per diem. we are also shown, practically, that our brains are capable of performing certain useful tricks, and that if we do not compel our brains to perform those tricks we shall suffer. thus one day we run home and proclaim to our delighted parents that eleven twelves are 132. a feat of the brain! so it goes on until our parents begin to look up to us because we can chatter of cosines or sketch the foreign policy of louis xiv. good! but not a word about the principles of the art of living yet! only a few detached rules from our parents, to be blindly followed when particular crises supervene. and, indeed, it would be absurd to talk to a schoolboy about the expression of his soul. he would probably mutter a monosyllable which is not 'mice.'
of course, school is merely a preparation for living; unless one goes to a university, in which case it is a preparation for university. one is supposed to turn one's attention to living when these preliminaries are over—say at the age of about twenty. assuredly one lives then; there is, however, nothing new in that, for one has been living all the time, in a fashion; all the time one has been using the machine without understanding it. but does one, school and college being over, enter upon a study of the machine? not a bit. the question then becomes, not how to live, but how to obtain and retain a position in which one will be able to live; how to get minute portions of dead animals and plants which one can swallow, in order not to die of hunger; how to acquire and constantly renew a stock of other portions of dead animals and plants in which one can envelop oneself in order not to die of cold; how to procure the exclusive right of entry into certain huts where one may sleep and eat without being rained upon by the clouds of heaven. and so forth. and when one has realised this ambition, there comes the desire to be able to double the operation and do it, not for oneself alone, but for oneself and another. marriage! but no scientific sustained attention is yet given to the real business of living, of smooth intercourse, of self-expression, of conscious adaptation to environment—in brief, to the study of the machine. at thirty the chances are that a man will understand better the draught of a chimney than his own respiratory apparatus—to name one of the simple, obvious things—and as for understanding the working of his own brain—what an idea! as for the skill to avoid the waste of power involved by friction in the business of living, do we give an hour to it in a month? do we ever at all examine it save in an amateurish and clumsy fashion? a young lady produces a water-colour drawing. 'very nice!' we say, and add, to ourselves, 'for an amateur.' but our living is more amateurish than that young lady's drawing; though surely we ought every one 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.
