few people—in fact, very few people indeed—ever realize the priceless value of the ancient counsel: “know thyself.” it seems so trite, so ordinary. it seems so easy to acquire, this knowledge. does not every one possess it? can it not be got by simply sitting down in a chair and yielding to a mood? and yet this knowledge is just about as difficult to acquire as a knowledge of chinese. certainly nine hundred and ninety-nine people out of a thousand reach the age of sixty before getting the rudiments of it. the majority of us die in almost complete ignorance of it. and none may be said to master it in all its exciting branches. why, you can choose any of your friends—the wisest of them—and instantly tell him something glaringly obvious about his own character and actions—and be rewarded for your trouble by an indignantly sincere denial! you had noticed it; all his friends had noticed it. but he had not noticed it. far from having noticed it, he is convinced that it exists only in your malicious imagination. for example, go to a friend whose sense of humour is notoriously imperfect, and say gently to him: “your sense of humour is imperfect, my friend,” and see how he will receive the information! so much for the rarity of self-knowledge.
self-knowledge is difficult because it demands intellectual honesty. it demands that one shall not blink the facts, that one shall not hide one’s head in the sand, and that one shall not be afraid of anything that one may happen to see in looking round. it 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 case, not everybody else’s case. why should he submit to everlasting boredom for the mere sake of acting like everybody else?
he continues in the same strain:
“but you are asking me to change my whole life—at my age!”
nothing of the sort! i am only suggesting that he should begin to live.
and then finally he cries:
“it’s too drastic. i haven’t the pluck!”
now we are coming to the real point.
