A Plea for the Classics

THE CONTRIBUTORS’ CLUB

IT is one of the inconveniences of man’s superiority that, though he shares with the animals the necessity for sleep, his higher intelligence has invented clothing, and this clothing, by habit and convention, must be taken off at night and put on again in the morning. When the custom began is now impossible to discover, for the earliest history of the race is written in its bones, and the shrewdest scientist cannot tell from a man’s skeleton what clothes, if any, he used to wear over it, or how often he changed them. One must believe, either by Genesis or by evolution, that our earliest ancestors wore nothing; and so the story starts with a perfect economy of time and attire, and ends — at present — with a vicious circle of monotonous repetitions.

It is a matter of simple arithmetic (as mine must be) to discover that an octogenarian has spent at least 50,000 hours at this business of taking off and putting on clothes.

I am less concerned with the unescapable monotony of this circle, which, as it were, surrounds my sleep, and around which I am doomed daily to travel, than with the waste of precious time compelled by this unavoidable exercise. Certainly I have no wish to sleep in my clothes, or to affront the sun and the public in the simpler garments dedicated to the night. For greater comfort in bed, and to avoid attracting embarrassing attention out of it, I jog round my circle with reasonable philosophy. What does disturb me — and I have often thought of it while undressing — is the realization of what I might be doing if I did not have to undress. It cannot be said, for instance, that I am in any way improved by what I am doing, for each morning, when the circle is completed, I am, with a remarkable exactitude, just where I was when I started the night before; it is not like doing my physical exercises, for in this case, although next morning I look in vain in the mirror for any visible sign of improvement, reason tells me that something has been accomplished. Nor again is it like the autosuggestion nowadays so widely practised before going to bed, for one can go to bed without doing the autosuggestion. More than that, we live in an age of self-improvement, and can hardly take up a magazine, or open our mail, without having our attention called to the importance of utilizing all available time for that purpose.

I received only the other day an account of four men who sat in the University Club of a Middle-Western city, three of whom were college graduates, while the fourth had had only a common school education, which he had wisely enlarged by reading fifteen minutes a day in the wellknown Harvard Classics. This man talked, and the others listened — as well they might, for he had apparently traveled widely, knew something about science, and was quite at home with history, biography, essays, and the drama. He was a man, I read also, who ‘writes in a style of unusual simplicity and persuasiveness — such a style as only comes to a man from reading the works of master writers. Men like to talk to him because he has somehow gained the rare gift of thinking clearly and talking interestingly.’

Naturally I felt a hopeless ambition to be like that myself; and then it appeared further that I too could do it, as a quarter of a million Americans have proved, if I followed his example. A few minutes of pleasant reading each day, and wherever I go afterward (unless, of course, I happen to run into one of those quarter of a million Americans) I, like him, will be listened to and envied.

Yet I find it difficult to get the fifteen minutes, and so must many another honest fellow who would like to be listened to and envied. Doubtless we fritter them away, a minute here and a minute there; anyway, it seems impossible for us to herd them together. We remain mere bumps on the social log. But, whatever else we do, we must undress at night and dress again in the morning — and there, all together, are more than fifteen minutes when, if we cannot read, we are quite able to listen. If an installment of the Classics were broadcast at bedtime, we could be taking in while we were taking off; if another installment were broadcast just after we got up, we could be taking in while we were putting on. And when we went out into the busy world of men and women we should be listened to, at first perhaps with surprise and annoyance, but by degrees, day by day and week by week, with increasing winder and envy. As we took off our clothes we should travel, stocking in hand, down the Nile with Herodotus — so the situation was presented to me, though without the stocking — or around the Horn with Dana; unbuttoning our collars before the bureau mirror, we should see, beyond and behind the stupid features that we know so well, the great Grecian dramas in the amphitheatre of Athens; barefooted, in our pajamas, we should stand beside Columbus on the Santa Maria at that thrilling moment when America trembled before discovery. And when the installment was finished — there we should be, all undressed and ready to hop into bed!

It seems quite feasible; nor is it a real objection, as the reader may at first think, that we do not all go to bed at the same time. It would be better for us if we did; and the broadcasting of the Classics might by imperceptible degrees, and without arousing the natural rebellion that would be caused by a Constitutional amendment, introduce a wholesome uniformity. Nor is it desirable that everybody should listen to the installments: there must be some left to listen to us. Having tuned in and got undressed, a man would just naturally turn in and go to sleep after hearing a selection of classical literature. But would he — I seem to hear a reader questioning — wake up in time to tune in next morning? Unquestionably yes, for this cautious question misses one of the most valuable results of the innovation, in that it assumes erroneously that a normal man is capable of an abnormal period of sleep.

I am reminded of Mr. Boswell, his lament over the pain of getting himself up in the morning, and his pathetic conviction that there ought to be something he could take for it. ‘As I imagine,’ he said, ‘that the human body may be put, by the operation of other substances, into any state in which it has ever been; and as I have experienced a state in which rising from bed was not disagreeable, but easy, nay, sometimes agreeable, I suppose that this state may be produced, if we knew by what.’ The significant thing in this lament is that Mr. Boswell admitted occasions when getting up had been easy, nay, sometimes agreeable. In the Middle Ages, when artificial illumination was poor and the manner of life presented comparatively few topics for conversation, people went to bed with the chickens, got up with the chickens, and that was all there was to it. No troubadour plucked his harp to accompany a humorous ditty about the difficulty of getting up in the morning. But in Boswell’s time, although illumination was not much better, there were many more incentives for sitting up — books, playhouses, clubs, conversations with Dr. Johnson, et cetera. The abbreviation of normal sleep that characterizes our own civilization was already operative on Mr. Boswell; and I only wonder that Dr. Johnson did not reply to him, ‘Why, sir, it may be produced by going to sleep eight good hours before you mean to get up.’ Broadcast, as they would be, under sound scientific advice, the morning installment of the Classics would allow for eight hours of sleep after the bedtime selection, and nearly everybody would wake up by natural inclination. The benefits of this regular and restful sleep need no exposition; and a nation whose people had widely and voluntarily followed this practice would make the rest of the world wonder.

There is another point that should be considered.

In many cases, no doubt, there is already a fifteen-minute reading of the Classics at bedtime, and these readers would have to stop until the broadcasting caught up with them. But the important thing is that little or nothing would be added to the time already required for physical exercise, autosuggestion, and correspondence. We live, as I have said, in an age of self-improvement — of exercise for the body, reading and correspondence courses for the intellect, and autosuggestion for the subconscious mind. It is a flowering of the printing press in many blossoms which may be, and are, picked in quantity in our bookstore gardens; and any honest, ambitious man, by dint of brief but regular periods of bedtime study or practice, may hope to mobilize his mid-brain, reduce his waist measure, enlarge his general culture, improve his health, or acquire useful proficiency in any chosen vocation. Steadily the horizon widens, and the race steps forward. Yet it is not so very long since men knew nothing at all about their subconscious minds, and kept fit physically in order, if the necessity arose, to kill each other as expeditiously as possible and with the minimum of personal risk.

In those days a man undressed, said his prayers, blew out his candle, and popped into bed. Some — for we are sadly mistaken if we assume that religious practice was even then universal — omitted the prayers. Many, I believe, still go to bed with the same heedless directness. The man who goes to bed in what might be called the ultramodern manner — who reads his Classics, does his exercises, studies his correspondence course, puts in a reasonable spell of autosuggestion before getting into bed, and finishes off with his formula and his knotted string just as he goes to sleep — is probably rare compared with those who have chosen and who pursue a single line of selfimprovement. And some nights, with the best of intentions, it must happen that he is a little delayed in reaching his bedchamber. He winds his alarm clock, sets it at the ultimate moment when he must get up, and sees plainly that, according to the wise physicians and their confounded eight hours of sleep, he ought really to be snug in bed and soundly asleep already. But it can’t be helped, and the sooner he begins his programme the better. So off coat and vest! Off necktie and collar, with a mental note for to-morrow, ‘Collar button under left-hand side bureau, probably pretty far back. Will need stick. Rolled under while taking off collar last night. A little annoyed, but kept my temper. This should help me keep temper under other circumstances.’ He takes off his trousers. He stands on the bottom of the right leg with his left foot, dexterously withdrawing his right foot; and then he stands on the bottom of the left leg with his right foot and, with equal dexterity, withdraws his left leg. That he accomplishes this without falling over does not astonish him. He will get undressed first, he tells himself, and sit down to his correspondence course in his comfortable dressing gown; and then his exercises; and then down the Nile with Columbus, or all aboard the Santa Maria with Christopher Herodotus; and then his autosuggestion; and then to bed, not forgetting his knotted string. He gets off a shoe. One shoe off, and the other shoe on, hey diddle diddle, my son John — Ahhhhhhhhh! Yesssssss! Exactly! Just the time (he continues, speaking to himself in a low, hard voice) for this devil-begotten shoestring to tie itself in a hard knot! He sits down on the floor to work the better at the knot; and now, indeed, he has a golden opportunity to practise his autosuggestion while he undresses himself. ‘ I am calm,’ he will perhaps say, ‘oh, quite calm. I am serene and untroubled and in no hurry at all. I am master of myself, and will soon be master of my shoestring. Day by day in every way this darn knot is getting looser and looser.’ It may well be, I grant you, that this is too much self-improvement for a man to manage at once.

But the broadcasting of the Classics at bedtime would certainly vary and enrich the now monotonous process of taking off and putting on our clothes. In my own case, for example, I should not only travel daily around the familiar circle, but I should progress steadily in a definite forward direction toward an ever more distinguished status in any company.