Arnold Bennett, the novelist and writer, who died in 1931, has much to say about time, music, concentration, reading and more besides in How to Live on 24 Hours a Day. Some currants:
“You wake up in the morning, and lo! your purse is magically filled with twenty-four hours of the unmanufactured tissue of the universe of your life! It is yours. It is the most precious of possessions.”
“Which of us is not saying to himself which of us has not been saying to himself all his life: ‘I shall alter that when I have a little more time’? We never shall have any more time. We have, and we have always had, all the time there is.”
“If you imagine that you will be able to achieve your ideal by ingeniously planning out a timetable with a pen on a piece of paper, you had better give up hope at once.If you are not prepared for discouragements and disillusions; if you will not be content with a small result for a big effort, then do not begin. Lie down again and resume the uneasy doze which you call your existence.”
“One of the chief things which my typical man has to learn is that the mental faculties are capable of a continuous hard activity; they do not tire like an arm or a leg. All they want is change – not rest, except in sleep.”
Novels are excluded from “serious reading,” so that the man who, bent on self-improvement, has been deciding to devote ninety minutes three times a week to a complete study of the works of Charles Dickens will be well advised to alter his plans. The reason is not that novels are not serious—some of the great literature of the world is in the form of prose fiction—the reason is that bad novels ought not to be read, and that good novels never demand any appreciable mental application on the part of the reader. It is only the bad parts of Meredith’s novels that are difficult. A good novel rushes you forward like a skiff down a stream, and you arrive at the end, perhaps breathless, but unexhausted. The best novels involve the least strain. Now in the cultivation of the mind one of the most important factors is precisely the feeling of strain, of difficulty, of a task which one part of you is anxious to achieve and another part of you is anxious to shirk; and that feeling cannot be got in facing a novel. You do not set your teeth in order to read Anna Karenina. Therefore, though you should read novels, you should not read them in those ninety minutes.”
“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 45 minutes to careful, fatiguing reflection (it is an awful bore at first) upon what you are reading, your 90 minutes of a night are chiefly wasted.”
“The proper, wise balancing of one’s whole life may depend upon the feasibility of a cup of tea at an unusual hour.”
We are grateful to the essay by Michael Foot in The Pleasure of Reading for drawing our attention to this work and also to Bennett’s Literary Taste. As Foot writes, ” I soon captured for reading the Arnold Bennett hours–on the bus, on the way home, every available period previously and recklessly squandered: real reading, reading for relaxation, reading in utter absorption, as if one were playing chess or watching Plymouth Argyle or falling in love or suchlike comparable pursuits.”