How to Live on Twenty-Four Hours a Day
Page: 15

what would my typical man exclaim? Yet that is the equivalent of what
the company does when it robs him of five minutes twice a day.

You say I am dealing with minutiae. I am. And later on I will justify myself.

Now will you kindly buy your paper and step into the train?




V

TENNIS AND THE IMMORTAL SOUL

You get into the morning train with your newspaper, and you calmly and
majestically give yourself up to your newspaper. You do not hurry. You
know you have at least half an hour of security in front of you. As your
glance lingers idly at the advertisements of shipping and of songs on the
outer pages, your air is the air of a leisured man, wealthy in time, of a
man from some planet where there are a hundred and twenty-four hours
a day instead of twenty-four. I am an impassioned reader of newspapers.
I read five English and two French dailies, and the news-agents alone
know how many weeklies, regularly. I am obliged to mention this personal
fact lest I should be accused of a prejudice against newspapers when I say
that I object to the reading of newspapers in the morning train. Newspapers
are produced with rapidity, to be read with rapidity. There is no place in my
daily programme for newspapers. I read them as I may in odd moments.
But I do read them. The idea of devoting to them thirty or forty consecutive
minutes of wonderful solitude (for nowhere can one more perfectly immerse
one's self in one's self than in a compartment full of silent, withdrawn, smoking
males) is to me repugnant. I cannot possibly allow you to scatter priceless
pearls of time with such Oriental lavishness. You are not the Shah of time.
Let me respectfully remind you that you have no more time than I have. No
newspaper reading in trains! I have already "put by" about three-quarters of
an hour for use.

Now you reach your office. And I abandon you there till six o'clock. I am
aware that you have nominally an hour (often in reality an hour and a half)
in the midst of the day, less than half of which time is given to eating. But