Living on 24 hours a day

Though the contexts may vary from those cloaked in spiritualism with suggestions of meals with a Buddah to those that guide you to a state of mindfulness, the essence of self-help books seems to be very much the same. 
And yet you are in search of happiness, are you not? Have you discovered it?
The chances are that you have not. The chances are that you have already come to believe that happiness is unattainable. But men have attained it. And they have attained it by realising that happiness does not spring from the procuring of physical or mental pleasure, but from the development of reason and the adjustment of conduct to principles.

That's what struck me when I read the really short book, How to Live on Twenty-Four Hours a Day by Arnold Bennett with a copyright date of 1910.  The author consciously references other book titles that say "How to live on X amount a day" to emphasize the point that time is money and even more precious and more evenly distributed than currency. I took a copy out from the library, but you can read the entire text online for free from the Gutenberg project here.

The book's central theme is maximizing one's time to achieve happiness, though not the happiness one pictures in a extroverted sense (see  http://uncommoncontent.blogspot.com/2013/08/happiness-is.html). The happiness is rather the result of achieving harmony between one's principles and one's actions. This point is revealed in chapter 8: 

We do not reflect. I mean that we do not reflect upon genuinely important things; upon the problem of our happiness, upon the main direction in which we are going, upon what life is giving to us, upon the share which reason has (or has not) in determining our actions, and upon the relation between our principles and our conduct.

The book is a 20th Century product, so it's no longer deferring to the Church for guidance on how to live. Rather it is exhorting one live according to principles and reason. In contrast to Disney's advice to follow your heart, you are advised to use your head. But in doing so you also gain an appreciation for science, art, music, literature (if those things interest you) or even your own daily life. What would be packaged today as "mindfulness," he calls reflecting on genuinely important things. 

Chapter 5 is entitled "Tennis and the Immortal Soul." The conjunction here is not intended to suggest a deep connection as one finds in  Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. On the contrary, the suggestion is that tennis and other leisure pursuits are what people regard as important while they neglect the type of "cultivation of mind" that the author believes is essential to feed the soul. That becomes clear from the end of the chapter:

 But I do suggest that you might, for a commencement, employ an hour and a half every other evening in some important and consecutive cultivation of the mind. You will still be left with three evenings for friends, bridge, tennis, domestic scenes, odd reading, pipes, gardening, pottering, and prize competitions. You will still have the terrific wealth of forty-five hours between 2 p.m. Saturday and 10 a.m. Monday. If you persevere you will soon want to pass four evenings, and perhaps five, in some sustained endeavour to be genuinely alive. And you will fall out of that habit of muttering to yourself at 11.15 p.m., "Time to be thinking about going to bed." The man who begins to go to bed forty minutes before he opens his bedroom door is bored; that is to say, he is not living.But remember, at the start, those ninety nocturnal minutes thrice a week must be the most important minutes in the ten thousand and eighty. They must be sacred, quite as sacred as a dramatic rehearsal or a tennis match. Instead of saying, "Sorry I can't see you, old chap, but I have to run off to the tennis club," you must say, "...but I have to work." This, I admit, is intensely difficult to say. Tennis is so much more urgent than the immortal soul. 

I find it fascinating that the core of such advice is so consistent for over a century, despite the massive changes the world has seen over two World Wars and the rapid advance of technology. That is not to mitigate the differences in contexts. They are quite striking. Clearly, the people the book addresses are not feeling the same stress people do today when they rise early to commute to work and return from it. Work begins for them at 10 AM and ends at 6 PM. The commute is assumed to take at most half an hour, though there also is an assumption of a sixth half day of work ending at 2 PM.


For people living in England in 2010, leisure time is not frittered away in front of a screen (not even a movie screen, never mind a smartphone, computer, or television). Even a radio is out of the picture, as music is only to be found in live events. Still they manage to fritter away time but just by doing this and that until thinking of going to bed for a good 45 minutes before doing so. In that way, one lets time slip through one's fingers instead of getting one's real 24 hours' worth. In fact, the author doesn't expect one to use all 24 hours but just to make better use of the time spent outside work by exercising one's mind for 90 minute sessions and actively reflecting at other times when is apt to adopt a "semi-comatose" state.

Another difference most of today's self-help books and this one is that very little attention is paid to exercise of the body. Bennet does mention that 10 minutes a day of that can make a difference. However, he is not arguing that one needs to put in the time for the physical regimen but for exercising the mind and getting it into shape. Likely people walked a lot more just to get around as we're talking about a time before cars were owned by the average person.

Chapter 7 is entitled "Controlling the Mind," and like many modern books on meditation, the goal is to achieve concentration and focus, though Bennet skips the thinking about nothing step and jumps right into focusing on your end goal:

"What? I am to cultivate my mind in the street, on the platform, in the train, and in the crowded street again?" Precisely. Nothing simpler! No tools required! Not even a book. Nevertheless, the affair is not easy. When you leave your house, concentrate your mind on a subject (no matter what, to begin with). You will not have gone ten yards before your mind has skipped away under your very eyes and is larking round the corner with another subject. Bring it back by the scruff of the neck. Ere you have reached the station you will have brought it back about forty times. Do not despair. Continue. Keep it up. You will succeed. You cannot by any chance fail if you persevere.

When you achieve a certain mindset, you can appreciate that "nothing in life is humdrum" as stated by the title of Chapter 10. In that chapter Bennet demonstrates how an appreciation of cause and effect can make one more philosophical and less shocked when things don't go one's way with the example of accepting one's stolen watch as the result of knowable causes. But it's not just a matter of learning to appreciate human nature but all of nature:"The whole field of daily habit and scene is waiting to satisfy that curiosity which means life, and the satisfaction of which means an understanding heart." That is something that can even be appreciated by someone who does not care for art, music, or literature. But for those who do care for the latter, Bennet devotes an entire chapter.

"Serious Reading" is the title of Chapter 11. By using that term, Bennet's intention is to exclude novels because they do not require the mental exertion that should be applied to the 90 minute program. Good novels are all too easy to read, he says, and bad ones just aren't worth reading at all. It's remarkable that what was considered merely popular literature then are are now seriously studied in college courses. Wouldn't any reader today be proud for working her way through something like Anna Karenina if she were not required to read it for a class? Bennet has loftier reading goals, as he indicated by his own choice of reading, including the works of Marcus Aurelius (he doesn't leave home without him in book form), Epictetus, Pascal, La Bruyere, and Emerson. No women featured here, though he does reserve special praise for Elizabeth Barrett Browning and recommends that everyone read Aurora Leigh.


Aside from praising poetry over prose, Bennet offers two concrete suggestions for the one who embarks on improving reading:

The first is to define the direction and scope of your efforts. Choose a limited period, or a limited subject, or a single author. Say to yourself: "I will know something about the French Revolution, or the rise of railways, or the works of John Keats." And during a given period, to be settled beforehand, confine yourself to your choice. There is much pleasure to be derived from being a specialist.

The second suggestion is to think as well as to read. I know people who read and read, and for all the good it does them they might just as well cut bread-and-butter. They take to reading as better men take to drink. They fly through the shires of literature on a motor-car, their sole object being motion. They will tell you how many books they have read in a year. Unless you give at least forty-five minutes to careful, fatiguing reflection (it is an awful bore at first) upon what you are reading, your ninety minutes of a night are chiefly wasted. This means that your pace will be slow. Never mind. Forget the goal; think only of the surrounding country; and after a period, perhaps when you least expect it, you will suddenly find yourself in a lovely town on a hill.

Related post: http://uncommoncontent.blogspot.com/2013/11/its-meaningful-life.html
http://uncommoncontent.blogspot.com/2014/12/views-on-boundaries.html

What do you expect?

Today I heard someone say what crystallized for me what exactly irks me about the popularization of the meme pictured at right. 

The initials after the quote stand for Erin Hanson, a twenty-year-old Australian who penned these lines while still in her teens:

There is freedom waiting for you,

On the breezes of the sky,

And you ask "What if I fall?"

Oh but my darling,

What if you fly?

On that site, the picture used to illustrate the poem shows a drawing of a girl sitting with her legs dangling over a cliff and a pair of colorful wings on her back. 

The theme is a twist on "nothing ventured, nothing gained." You have to assume some risk to gain the potential benefit of advancing and changing. That's quite true, but I'm still bothered by the way this is set up because we all know what will happen to anyone who tries to jump off a cliff with just a pair of costume wings. 

A life devoid of hope and dreams is pretty gloomy. However, a life based on false hope and irrational expectations is pathetic and sad. So what do you do? You keep your expectations within the realm of possibility and keep the risks within check.

Perhaps that's my own parental bias, but I see it this way. You don't do your children any favors by encouraging them to try things that are not only beyond them but would cause them injury. In other words, you don't tell your kid to go ahead and climb a mountain until s/he has completed training for such a feat. 

What you can do is tell a kid to try to ride a bicycle even if there is a risk of falling and injury (I broke my ankle twice by falling off a bike) because it is a rational expectation that the kid will pick up on the balancing skills and the risk of a broken limb along the way is a manageable one. 

Aspiration is a good thing, but an expectation that one will achieve actual flight is dangeorusly delusional. Before anyone says I'm being too literal, I assure you, I'm very adept at abstract thinking. My point is  not just about defying the laws of physics but about the larger idea of setting up expectations.  

What's attainable, and what's worth the risk? That's something that everyone has to answer for him/herself. Would I venture into woods near dark? No. But I would venture on trails with plenty of hours of sunlight and adequate water. 

From my perspective, venturing out, say to go for an interview, meet friends, or see a new place is worth the risk of hitting traffic or getting somewhat lost, so long as you have a way to get back on track without getting into seriously dangerous areas.  But if I wanted to fly, I'd take a plane. 

Related post: http://kallahmagazine.blogspot.com/2015/03/modeling-behavior-for-child.html

  

Poetry: the difference between practice and art

I gained new appreciation for Stella Gibbons' masterpiece, Cold Comfort Farm, over the weekend. I didn't reread it; I recollected the heroine's order to her protege, Elfine, to stop writing poetry. After looking at the collection of poems my put together in my daughter's high school, I can really appreciate that point.


So what's the problem with the poetic outpouring of high school students? I'm sure there are some gifted writers who do produce poetry worth reading in their teens. I'd guess that some of  Emily Bronte's compositions were written before she was 20 and are worth reading, as are the works of John Keats who produced some of the most beautiful poems in the English language at a very young age. 

However, most high school level writers do not achieve that level of art. I was thinking about why that is. For one thing, I doubt many labor over an individual poem for hour to achieve particular effects. Instead, what they seem to do, is hope to come across as deep or emotional by inserting "silent screams" and other imagined reaction to violence, persecution, or loss. 

I know there are some students in the schools who have experienced major trauma. A few of them have lost parents to cancer or even a more sudden fatal illness. Some have been through cancer treatments themselves. But no one is writing about real pain that they've experienced. Instead, they imagine a situation they only know about second-hand. That's the problem.

What is poetry? That nearly as big a question as "what is art?"  I don't offer a full answer, but when you set out to define the type of poetry classified as lyrical, which focuses on feeling rather than events, I'm inclined to agree with Wordsworth's definition of poetry from the Introduction to Lyrical Ballads:  “Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.”

While it is possible to write about what you have not actually experienced and to even depict some of the emotion effectively, you'd have to be a pretty accomplished writer to pull it off in novel or play form. But for poetry, it would only work for a poet with great powers of empathy to depict feelings s/he has not actually experienced. Very few can carry that off, and that certainly applies to high school students who may otherwise consider themselves good writers.Tacking on stock descriptions to convey angst only emphasizes that the piece is not about a genuine emotional experience. 


Thinking of the type of literature that relies on second-hand sensations also reminded me of a pivotal point in  Little Women.   Within the novel Louisa May Alcott shares the story behind her coming to write this type of book. The professor she ends up marrying tells her to give up the pulp fiction and write about something real. Like Jo, Alcott had made money selling "blood and thunder"  tale, s But those stories (and I've read one or two that were published) are not truly memorable in the way the  Little Women series or Eight Cousins are. (Likely she would have been altogether forgotten if she had not moved onto the books for which she is known today, much like Ann Radcliff would not likely be in print at all today  if not for the references to her The Mysteries of Udolpho in Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey. )

I wish the teacher who serves as the guide for the literary journal in the school would adopt the professor's approach and encourage the budding writers to look for the real rather than the tragedy of larger proportions that they can only imagine. Or for the truly brilliant writers, she can offer satire, something like "The ruin of my hair" as a sort of modern take on Pope's "The Rape of the Lock." It would be a greater challenge for them to keep up the heroic couplets than to just string together sad-sounding word in free verse, and they can offer a humorous look at themselves rather than a pseudo-look at someone else.

The book on the exhibit

A few weeks ago, I visited the New York Historical Society's Armory Show exhibit. Though it opened in 2013 for the 100 year anniversary, you can still catch it until February 23, 2014 (and if you're a Bank of America credit card holder you can get in free, January 5 and February 2 courtesy of the Museums on Us program)

 There is an audio guide for the exhibit, but it is really difficult to take in all the details of the politics behind the show from that information. It became much clearer when I read Elizabeth Lunday's The Modern Art Invasion: Picasso, Duchamp, and the 1913 Armory Show That Scandalized America.The books clarifies the differences in various types of modern art and the reactions they aroused.

 One of the things I found striking was how responses spread in 1913, through poetry, of all things. Lunday explains (p.80) that it would have been the "Twitter" of the day. "Where today's individual tweet and caption photographs in response to popular events, in the 1910s they wrote poetry -- vast reams of it, on every subject from the weather to fashion, foreign wars to the suffrage movement." The number of rhymes devoted to the Armory Show made it the equivalent of the subject an internet "'meme'" today. The book includes a few examples of such rhymes.

While the subject is the Armory Show, the book follows up on development in the modern art world throughout most of the 20th century and touches on major figures in American art whose fame came laer. One figure who currently looms large in the art world and did sell a painting through the show is Edward Hooper. But it wasn't the show that made him a success. He didn't sell another painting until another decade had passed. Lunday follows up on him briefly, as well as other artists whose names have became associated with modern art -- or the reactions against it.

Related posts: http://uncommoncontent.blogspot.com/2013/11/masterpiece-marketing.html
http://uncommoncontent.blogspot.com/2013/01/art-reflecting-life-reflecting-art.html

Working alone

Emily Bronte, that author of Wuthering Heights and many poems, was the paradigmatic introvert as artist. She refused to accompany her sisters to London when Charlotte decided that they had to show themselves to prove that Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell were three different writers. Emily never wanted to leave home and had absolutely no craving for society or its adulation. Yet, she had a clear sense of herself as artist, composing without an audience.

 In Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking  Susan Cain  suggests that solitude is necessary for great achievement.  She quotes the following from  Steve Wozniak's memoir iWoz (pp. 73-74):

Most inventors and engineers I’ve met are like me – they’re shy and they live in their heads. They’re almost like artists. In fact, the very best of them are artists. And artists work best alone where they can control an invention’s design without a lot of other people designing it for marketing or some other committee. I don’t believe anything really revolutionary has been invented by committee. If you’re that rare engineer who’s an inventor and also an artist, I’m going to give you some advice that might be hard to take. That advice is: Work alone. You’re going to be best able to design revolutionary products and features if you’re working on your own. Not on a committee. Not on a team.

There is a rather Romantic (with the capital R) association with the artist as solitary figure. William Wordsworth certainly cultivated that image with poems that refer to his solitary walks, "I wandered lonely as a cloud," and the like. 

In fact, he was often walking with his sister Dorothy or his friend and fellow-poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, but he liked to project the image of the solitary artist alone in nature with his imagination capturing its sublime aspects. He also often reviewed the experience of his wandering by reading the account carefully transcribed in his sister's journal and projecting his solitary poetic presence into that to come up with poems that focus on his singular reaction to what he sees and experiences. So not exactly working on his own.

 The Bronte sisters actually began their expeditions into the world of imagination together with a famous account of naming their brother's toy soldiers and then using those names for the characters who peopled the literary landscape of some heady works.  True, they then went off in their own direction, though they did form their own kind of writing community.  In fact, no literate writer really works completely alone because s/he has the knowledge of the works of poetry and prose that came before. It may not be a conscious collaboration, certainly not the product of deliberate teamwork, but still the product of more than a single mind isolated from others.  

Related post: http://uncommoncontent.blogspot.com/2012/04/great-introvert.html
http://kallahmagazine.blogspot.com/2012/04/susan-cains-grandfather.html
http://uncommoncontent.blogspot.com/2012/05/perspectives-on-introversion-this-is.html
http://uncommoncontent.blogspot.com/2014/12/views-on-boundaries.html