How to Live on Twenty-Four Hours a Day
Page: 8

To you, my dear sir, I present my excuses and apologies. You are precisely
the man that I have been wishing to meet for about forty years. Will you
kindly send me your name and address, and state your charge for telling me
how you do it? Instead of me talking to you, you ought to be talking to me.
Please come forward. That you exist, I am convinced, and that I have not
yet encountered you is my loss. Meanwhile, until you appear, I will continue
to chat with my companions in distress--that 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