How to Live

No ONE, so far as I know, has ever accused our friends and fellow toilers in the vineyard who publish the Reader’s Digest of commercial obtuseness. If such an accusation has been brought, it has never resulted in a true bill of indictment. The facts are too eloquent. The millions of readers of the Digest are living testimonials to the fact that the right goods have been delivered to the right marketwhich, after all, is the essence of merchandising. The circulation figures of the Reader’s Digest demonstrate beyond question or qualification that the editors and publishers of that impressive pocketful of monthly wisdom know what the American public likes and wants. They must be right. All the rest of us are just living in a dreamworld. Those boys in Pleasantville know the facts of American life. It is not impossible to conceive the high amusement with which they regard the antics of other editors.

When, therefore, the editors of the Reader’s Digest roll up their sleeves, spit on their hands, and produce a selection of the most personally helpful articles published in the Reader’s Digest during the past twenty-five years, you may be sure that something significant in the history of American culture is being produced for you in a big way. I suppose that this volume, Getting the Most Out of Life, will sell on an unprecedented scale. It has behind it all the wisdom and “know-how” of the Reader’s Digest staff, their unmatched understanding of the American mass mind, and their fundamentally honest and constructive approach to living.

The book is horribly virtuous and oh so true. It is based on the assumption that we —all of us — want to be a little better than we are. This is a fair assumption. I want to be a little better than I am. I am well aware that there are several ways in which I could be improved. Therefore I turn with avidity — which I am sure will be shared with millions of others-to this brisk anthology of recipes for ersatz happiness.

I was somewhat discouraged by my first dive into the volume. The article “I Owe My Career to Losing a Leg,” by Major Alexander P. de Seversky, seemed somewhat severe for an earnest selfimprover who hadn’t really begun to eat his breakfast oats and flex his knees at 8.00 A.M. So I turned to another article. This was “Building a Personality.” I have always longed to be a personality, but somehow I have never quite been able to be one. All around me, men with goatees and wearing jodhpurs go walking up and down being personalities. And I am zero. Harry Emerson Fosdick D.D., wrote this one: “A consulting psychologist told me recently that most cases of emotional maladjustment are due to the fact that people will not accept themselves. They resent their limitations. They want to be someone else.” That is no help to me. It is true that I want to be someone else. Almost anyone else. I should like to be Casanova, but there seems little likelihood of it. Nothing about me reminds people of Casanova, try as I will.

Then there are all sorts of articles about physical culture. One of the best of them is “ lake a Deep Breath.” I didn’t read it because I was afraid that I might take a deep breath, the effects of which would undoubtedly have been lethal. There is an article about William Muldoon, who helped some 18,000 men back to health when they were in a fine way to die of inanition and other things. Many of these men were of the Wall Street broker class, and Mr. Muldoon by preserving them probably made the 1929 crash and the depression inevitable.

I do not mean that he ought to have shot them, but at least he might have let them stew and simmer in their own juices.

I didn’t read “What Are You Really Fitted For?” because the question discouraged me. And “Women over Forty” left me just a little cold.

There is an article called “You Can Sleep.”I passed that up, as I did the piece by Gene Tunney, “It’s More Fun to Be Fit,” which had diagrams in it of men bending over. Suppose you bent over in one of those exercises and then couldn’t unbend! What would you be? Practically a cripple.

There’s a good deal about religion and how not to be a bore, and there is a perfectly frightful chapter called “Wake Up and Live! It begins: “Two vears ago I was a failure. Oh, nobody knew it except me.” And so on. “How to Win Friends and Influence People” by Dale Carnegie is presented in condensed form. I didn’t read this because I was afraid that I might go out and win a lot of friends. I don’t want any more friends. And if I developed a new technique of kicking people in the ribs and shouting, “Hi-ya, Mac! I might find myself encumbered with cloying personalities.

In this fine volume, sex rears its ugly head only once, and then in the very nicest way, having to do with marriage. Everything is constructive and “personally helpful.” Reading or self-education gets a very small play. The principal thing is to flex your muscles, your mind, and your bank account. Wake Up and Live!

Nothing is said about dying. “Getting the Most Out of Life” is the theme and the editors have omitted any discussion of a dignified method of getting out of life. Probably not a popular subject, but one which needs consideration in a book of this kind. “How to Die Decently” would be a good chapter to add to this anthology on how to live. But apparently we live forever, flexing our joints and improving our minds in an eternal and hopeless effort to become better and better. And then we die.