The Art of Manliness - Manvotionals: Timeless Wisdom and Advice on Living the 7 Manly Virtues

by Brett McKay

  Carpe Diem.

  * * *

  “Pereunt et imputantur.” (“The hours perish, and are laid to our charge.”) —Inscription on a sun dial at Oxford

  The Supply of Time

  FROM HOW TO LIVE ON 24 HOURS A DAY, 1910

  By Arnold Bennett

  Newspapers are full of articles explaining how to live on such-and-such a sum, and these articles provoke a correspondence whose violence proves the interest they excite. … I have seen an essay, “How to live on eight shillings a week.” But I have never seen an essay, “How to live on twenty-four hours a day.” Yet it has been said that time is money. That proverb understates the case. Time is a great deal more than money. If you have time you can obtain money—usually. But though you have the wealth of a cloak-room attendant at the Carlton Hotel, you cannot buy yourself a minute more time than I have, or the cat by the fire has.

  Philosophers have explained space. They have not explained time. It is the inexplicable raw material of everything. With it, all is possible; without it, nothing. The supply of time is truly a daily miracle, an affair genuinely astonishing when one examines it. You wake up in the morning, and lo! your purse is magically filled with twenty-four hours of the unmanufactured tissue of the universe of your life! It is yours. It is the most precious of possessions. A highly singular commodity, showered upon you in a manner as singular as the commodity itself!

  For remark! No one can take it from you. It is unstealable. And no one receives either more or less than you receive.

  Talk about an ideal democracy! In the realm of time there is no aristocracy of wealth, and no aristocracy of intellect. Genius is never rewarded by even an extra hour a day. And there is no punishment. Waste your infinitely precious commodity as much as you will, and the supply will never be withheld from you. No mysterious power will say: “This man is a fool, if not a knave. He does not deserve time; he shall be cut off at the meter.” It is more certain than consols, and payment of income is not affected by Sundays. Moreover, you cannot draw on the future. Impossible to get into debt! You can only waste the passing moment. You cannot waste tomorrow; it is kept for you. You cannot waste the next hour; it is kept for you.

  I said the affair was a miracle. Is it not?

  You have to live on this twenty-four hours of daily time. Out of it you have to spin health, pleasure, money, content, respect, and the evolution of your immortal soul. Its right use, its most effective use, is a matter of the highest urgency and of the most thrilling actuality. All depends on that. Your happiness—the elusive prize that you are all clutching for, my friends!—depends on that. Strange that the newspapers, so enterprising and up-to-date as they are, are not full of “How to live on a given income of time,” instead of “How to live on a given income of money!” Money is far commoner than time. When one reflects, one perceives that money is just about the commonest thing there is. It encumbers the earth in gross heaps.

  If one can’t contrive to live on a certain income of money, one earns a little more—or steals it, or advertises for it. One doesn’t necessarily muddle one’s life because one can’t quite manage on a thousand pounds a year; one braces the muscles and makes it guineas, and balances the budget. But if one cannot arrange that an income of twenty-four hours a day shall exactly cover all proper items of expenditure, one does muddle one’s life definitely. The supply of time, though gloriously regular, is cruelly restricted.

  Which of us lives on twenty-four hours a day? And when I say “lives,” I do not mean exists, nor “muddles through.” Which of us is free from that uneasy feeling that the “great spending departments” of his daily life are not managed as they ought to be? … Which of us is not saying to himself—which of us has not been saying to himself all his life: “I shall alter that when I have a little more time?”

  Innumerable band of souls who are haunted, more or less painfully, by the feeling that the years slip by, and slip by, and slip by, and that they have not yet been able to get their lives into proper working order.

  If we analyse that feeling, we shall perceive it to be, primarily, one of uneasiness, of expectation, of looking forward, of aspiration. It is a source of constant discomfort, for it behaves like a skeleton at the feast of all our enjoyments. We go to the theatre and laugh; but between the acts it raises a skinny finger at us. We rush violently for the last train, and while we are cooling a long age on the platform waiting for the last train, it promenades its bones up and down by our side and inquires: “O man, what hast thou done with thy youth? What art thou doing with thine age?” You may urge that this feeling of continuous looking forward, of aspiration, is part of life itself, and inseparable from life itself. True!

  But there are degrees. A man may desire to go to Mecca. His conscience tells him that he ought to go to Mecca. He fares forth, either by the aid of Cook’s, or unassisted; he may probably never reach Mecca; he may drown before he gets to Port Said; he may perish ingloriously on the coast of the Red Sea; his desire may remain eternally frustrate. Unfulfilled aspiration may always trouble him. But he will not be tormented in the same way as the man who, desiring to reach Mecca, and harried by the desire to reach Mecca, never leaves Brixton.

  It is something to have left Brixton. Most of us have not left Brixton. We have not even taken a cab to Ludgate Circus and inquired from Cook’s the price of a conducted tour. And our excuse to ourselves is that there are only twenty-four hours in the day.

  If we further analyse our vague, uneasy aspiration, we shall, I think, see that it springs from a fixed idea that we ought to do something in addition to those things which we are loyally and morally obliged to do. We are obliged, by various codes written and unwritten, to maintain ourselves and our families (if any) in health and comfort, to pay our debts, to save, to increase our prosperity by increasing our efficiency. A task sufficiently difficult! A task which very few of us achieve! A task often beyond our skill! Yet, if we succeed in it, as we sometimes do, we are not satisfied; the skeleton is still with us.

  And even when we realise that the task is beyond our skill, that our powers cannot cope with it, we feel that we should be less discontented if we gave to our powers, already overtaxed, something still further to do.

  And such is, indeed, the fact. The wish to accomplish something outside their formal programme is common to all men who in the course of evolution have risen past a certain level.

  Until an effort is made to satisfy that wish, the sense of uneasy waiting for something to start which has not started will remain to disturb the peace of the soul.

  “A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play; his labor and his leisure; his mind and his body; his education and his recreation. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he is doing, and leaves others to determine whether he is working or playing. To himself, he always appears to be doing both.” —L.P. Jacks

  Reveille

  FROM A SHROPSHIRE LAD, 1896

  By A.E. Houseman

  Wake: the silver dusk returning

  Up the beach of darkness brims,

  And the ship of sunrise burning

  Strands upon the eastern rims.

  Wake: the vaulted shadow shatters,

  Trampled to the floor it spanned,

  And the tent of night in tatters

  Straws the sky-pavilioned land.

  Up, lad, up, ’tis late for lying:

  Hear the drums of morning play;

  Hark, the empty highways crying

  “Who’ll beyond the hills away?”

  Towns and countries woo together,

  Forelands beacon, belfries call;

  Never lad that trod on leather

  Lived to feast his heart with all.

  Up, lad: thews that lie and cumber

  Sunlit pallets never thrive;

  Morns abed and daylight slumber

  Were not meant for man alive.

  Clay lies still,
but blood’s a rover;

  Breath’s a ware that will not keep.

  Up, lad: when the journey’s over

  There’ll be time enough to sleep.

  “It is not necessary for a man to be actively bad in order to make a failure in life; simple inaction will accomplish it. Nature has everywhere written her protest against idleness; everything which ceases to struggle, which remains inactive, rapidly deteriorates. It is the struggle toward an ideal, the constant effort to get higher and further, which develops manhood and character.” —James Terry White

  Energetic Men

  FROM READINGS FOR YOUNG MEN, MERCHANTS, AND MEN OF BUSINESS, 1859

  We love upright, energetic men. Pull them this way, and then that way, and the other, and they only bend, but never break. Trip them down, and in a trice they are on their feet. Bury them in the mud, and in an hour they will be out and bright. They are not ever yawning away existence, or walking about the world as if they had come into it with only half their soul; you cannot keep them down; you cannot destroy them. But for these the world would soon degenerate. They are the salt of the earth. Who but they start any noble project? They build our cities and rear our manufactories; they whiten the ocean with their sails; they draw treasures from the mine; they plow the earth. Blessings on them! Look to them, young men, and take courage; imitate their example; catch the spirit of their energy and enterprise, and you will deserve, and no doubt command, success.

  “Rest not! Life is sweeping by,

  Go and dare, before you die;

  Something mighty and sublime

  Leave behind to conquer time!”

  —Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  The Improvement of Spare Moments

  FROM PUSHING TO THE FRONT, 1894

  By Orison Swett Marden

  On the floor of the gold-working room, in the United States Mint at Philadelphia, there is a wooden lattice-work which is taken up when the floor is swept, and the fine particles of gold-dust, thousands of dollars’ yearly, are thus saved. So every successful man has a kind of network to catch “the raspings and parings of existence, those leavings of days and wee bits of hours” which most people sweep into the waste of life. He who hoards and turns to account all odd minutes, half hours, unexpected holidays, gaps between times, and chasms of waiting for unpunctual persons, achieves results which astonish those who have not mastered this most valuable secret.

  The days come to us like friends in disguise, bringing priceless gifts from an unseen hand; but, if we do not use them, they are borne silently away, never to return. Each successive morning new gifts are brought, but if we failed to accept those that were brought yesterday and the day before, we become less and less able to turn them to account, until the ability to appreciate and utilize them is exhausted. Wisely was it said that lost wealth may be regained by industry and economy, lost knowledge by study, lost health by temperance and medicine, but lost time is gone forever.

  “Oh, it’s only five minutes or ten minutes till meal-time; there’s no time to do anything now,” is one of the commonest expressions heard in the family. But what monuments have been built up by poor boys with no chance, out of broken fragments of time which many of us throw away! The very hours you have wasted, if improved, might have insured your success.

  The author of “Paradise Lost” was a teacher, Secretary of the Commonwealth, Secretary of the Lord Protector, and had to write his sublime poetry whenever he could snatch a few minutes from a busy life. John Stuart Mill did much of his best work as a writer while a clerk in the East India House. Galileo was a surgeon, yet to the improvement of his spare moments the world owes some of its greatest discoveries.

  If a genius like Gladstone carried through life a little book in his pocket lest an unexpected spare moment slip from his grasp, what should we of common abilities not resort to, to save the precious moments from oblivion? … Many a great man has snatched his reputation from odd bits of time which others, who wonder at their failure to get on, throw away. In Dante’s time nearly every literary man in Italy was a hardworking merchant, physician, statesman, judge, or soldier.

  Oh, the power of ceaseless industry to perform miracles!

  One hour a day withdrawn from frivolous pursuits and profitably employed would enable any man of ordinary capacity to master a complete science. One hour a day would in ten years make an ignorant man a well-informed man. … In an hour a day a boy or a girl could read twenty pages thoughtfully—over seven thousand pages, or eighteen large volumes in a year.

  An hour a day might make all the difference between bare existence and useful, happy living. An hour a day might make—nay, has made—an unknown man a famous one, a useless man a benefactor to his race. Consider, then, the mighty possibilities of two—four—yes, six hours a day that are, on the average, thrown away by young men.

  Every young man should have a hobby to occupy his leisure hours, something useful to which he can turn with delight. It might be in line with his work or otherwise, only his heart must be in it.

  If one chooses wisely, the study, research, and occupation that a hobby confers will broaden character and transform the home.

  “He has nothing to prevent him but too much idleness, which, I have observed,” says Burke, “fills up a man’s time much more completely and leaves him less his own master, than any sort of employment whatsoever.”

  Some boys will pick up a good education in the odds and ends of time which others carelessly throw away, as one man saves a fortune by small economies which others disdain to practise. What young man is too busy to get an hour a day for self-improvement?

  Great men have ever been misers of moments. Cicero said: “What others give to public shows and entertainments, nay, even to mental and bodily rest, I give to the study of philosophy.” Lord Bacon’s fame springs from the work of his leisure hours while Chancellor of England. During an interview with a great monarch, Goethe suddenly excused himself, went into an adjoining room and wrote down a thought for his “Faust,” lest it should be forgotten. … Pope would often rise in the night to write out thoughts that would not come during the busy day. Grote wrote his matchless “History of Greece” during the hours of leisure snatched from his duties as a banker.

  Dr. Darwin composed most of his works by writing his thoughts on scraps of paper wherever he happened to be. Watt learned chemistry and mathematics while working at his trade of a mathematical instrument-maker. Henry Kirke White learned Greek while walking to and from the lawyer’s office where he was studying. Dr. Burney learned Italian and French on horseback. Matthew Hale wrote his “Contemplations” while traveling on his circuit as judge.

  The present time is the raw material out of which we make whatever we will. Do not brood over the past, or dream of the future, but seize the instant and get your lesson from the hour. The man is yet unborn who rightly measures and fully realizes the value of an hour. As Fenelon says, God never gives but one moment at a time, and does not give a second until he withdraws the first.

  The worst of a lost hour is not so much in the wasted time as in the wasted power. Idleness rusts the nerves and makes the muscles creak. Work has system, laziness has none.

  In factories for making cloth a single broken thread ruins a whole web; it is traced back to the girl who made the blunder and the loss is deducted from her wages. But who shall pay for the broken threads in life’s great web? We cannot throw back and forth an empty shuttle; threads of some kind follow every movement as we weave the web of our fate. It may be a shoddy thread of wasted hours or lost opportunities that will mar the fabric and mortify the workman forever; or it may be a golden thread which will add to its beauty and luster.

  “Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.” —Thomas Edison

  Opportunity

  By Edward Rowland Sill, 1880

  This I beheld, or dreamed it in a dream:—

  There spread a cloud of dust along a plain;


  And underneath the cloud, or in it, raged

  A furious battle, and men yelled, and swords

  Shocked upon swords and shields. A prince’s banner

  Wavered, then staggered backward, hemmed by foes.

  A craven hung along the battle’s edge,

  And thought: “Had I a sword of keener steel—

  That blue blade that the king’s son bears—but this

  Blunt thing—!” he snapt and flung it from his hand,

  And lowering crept away and left the field.

  Then came the king’s son, wounded, sore bestead,

  And weaponless, and saw the broken sword,

  Hilt-buried in the dry and trodden sand,

  And ran and snatched it, and with battle-shout

  Lifted afresh he hewed his enemy down,

  And saved a great cause on that heroic day.

  “Mankind is more indebted to industry than ingenuity; the gods set up their favors at a price, and industry is the purchaser.” —Joseph Addison

  Dead Work

  FROM SELF-CULTURE THROUGH THE VOCATION, 1914

  By Edward Howard Griggs

  There is an almost universal optical illusion with reference to work: each of us is fully conscious of the dead work in his own calling, because he must fulfill it; with the tasks of others, he sees only the finished product. Thus each is inclined to exaggerate the dead work in his own vocation and to envy the apparently easier and happier tasks of others. You sit down in an audience room, and some master at the piano sweeps you out on to the bosom of the sea of emotion, playing with you at his will. The evening of melody is over; there is the moment of awed silence and then the storm of applause; you go home exclaiming, “What genius!” O yes, it is genius: someone has defined genius as the capacity for hard work. Genius is more than that—much more; but no exaggerated talent would take a man far, without the capacity for hard work; and what you forget, as you listen to the finished art of the master genius, is the days and nights of consecrated toil, foregoing, not only dissipation, but even innocent pleasures others take as their natural right, that the artist might master and keep the mastery of the technique of his art.