Frenzied Fiction: Ch. 12 - This Strenuous Age

Ch. 12 - This Strenuous Age

Something is happening, I regret to find, to the world
in which we used to live. The poor old thing is being
"speeded up." There is "efficiency" in the air. Offices
open at eight o'clock. Millionaires lunch on a baked
apple. Bankers eat practically nothing. A college president
has declared that there are more foot pounds of energy
in a glass of peptonized milk than in--something else,
I forget what. All this is very fine. Yet somehow I feel
out of it.

My friends are failing me. They won't sit up after
midnight. They have taken to sleeping out of doors, on
porches and pergolas. Some, I understand, merely roost
on plain wooden bars. They rise early. They take deep
breathing. They bathe in ice water. They are no good.

This change I am sure, is excellent. It is, I am certain,
just as it ought to be. I am merely saying, quietly and
humbly, that I am not in it. I am being left behind.
Take, for example, the case of alcohol. That, at least,
is what it is called now. There were days when we called
it Bourbon whisky and Tom Gin, and when the very name of
it breathed romance. That time is past.

The poor stuff is now called alcohol, and none so low
that he has a good word for it. Quite right, I am certain.
I don't defend it. Alcohol, they are saying to-day, if
taken in sufficient quantities, tears all the outer
coating off the diaphragm. It leaves the epigastric
tissue, so I am informed, a useless wreck.

This I don't deny. It gets, they tell me, into the brain.
I don't dispute it. It turns the prosencephalon into mere
punk. I know it. I've felt it doing it. They tell me--and
I believe it--that after even one glass of alcohol, or
shall we say Scotch whisky and soda, a man's working
power is lowered by twenty per cent. This is a dreadful
thing. After three glasses, so it is held, his capacity
for sustained rigid thought is cut in two. And after
about six glasses the man's working power is reduced by
at least a hundred per cent. He merely sits there--in
his arm-chair, at his club let us say--with all power,
even all _desire_ to work gone out of him, not thinking
rigidly, not sustaining his thought, a mere shapeless
chunk of geniality, half hidden in the blue smoke of his
cigar.

Very dreadful, not a doubt. Alcohol is doomed; it is
going it is gone. Yet when I think of a hot Scotch on a
winter evening, or a Tom Collins on a summer morning, or
a gin Rickey beside a tennis-court, or a stein of beer
on a bench beside a bowling-green--I wish somehow that
we could prohibit the use of alcohol and merely drink
beer and whisky and gin as we used to. But these things,
it appears, interfere with work. They have got to go.

But turn to the broader and simpler question of _work_
itself. In my time one hated it. It was viewed as the
natural enemy of man. Now the world has fallen in love
with it. My friends, I find, take their deep breathing
and their porch sleeping because it makes them work
better. They go for a week's vacation in Virginia not
for its own sake, but because they say they can work
better when they get back. I know a man who wears very
loose boots because he can work better in them: and
another who wears only soft shirts because he can work
better in a soft shirt. There are plenty of men now who
would wear dog-harness if they thought they could work
more in it. I know another man who walks away out into
the country every Sunday: not that he likes the country
--he wouldn't recognize a bumble bee if he saw it--but
he claims that if he walks on Sunday his head is as clear
as a bell for work on Monday.

Against work itself, I say nothing. But I sometimes wonder
if I stand alone in this thing. Am I the _only_ person
left who hates it?

Nor is work all. Take food. I admit, here and now, that
the lunch I like best--I mean for an ordinary plain lunch,
not a party--is a beef steak about one foot square and
two inches thick. Can I work on it? No, I can't, but I
can work in spite of it. That is as much as one used to
ask, twenty-five years ago.

Yet now I find that all my friends boast ostentatiously
about the meagre lunch they eat. One tells me that he
finds a glass of milk and a prune is quite as much as he
cares to take. Another says that a dry biscuit and a
glass of water is all that his brain will stand. One
lunches on the white of an egg. Another eats merely the
yolk. I have only two friends left who can eat a whole
egg at a time.

I understand that the fear of these men is that if they
eat more than an egg or a biscuit they will feel heavy
after lunch. Why they object to feeling heavy, I do not
know. Personally, I enjoy it. I like nothing better than
to sit round after a heavy lunch with half a dozen heavy
friends, smoking heavy cigars. I am well aware that that
is wicked. I merely confess the fact. I do not palliate it.

Nor is food all, nor drink, nor work, nor open air. There
has spread abroad along with the so-called physical
efficiency a perfect passion for _information_. Somehow
if a man's stomach is empty and his head clear as a bell,
and if he won't drink and won't smoke, he reaches out
for information. He wants facts. He reads the newspapers
all though, instead of only reading the headings. He
clamours for articles filled with statistics about
illiteracy and alien immigration and the number of
battleships in the Japanese navy.

I know quite a lot of men who have actually bought the
new _Encyclopaedia Britannica_. What is more, they _read_
the thing. They sit in their apartments at night with a
glass of water at their elbow reading the encyclopaedia.
They say that it is literally filled with facts. Other
men spend their time reading the Statistical Abstract of
the United States (they say the figures in it are great)
and the Acts of Congress, and the list of Presidents
since Washington (or was it Washington?).

Spending their evenings thus, and topping it off with a
cold baked apple, and sleeping out in the snow, they go
to work in the morning, so they tell me, with a positive
sense of exhilaration. I have no doubt that they do. But,
for me, I confess that once and for all I am out of it.
I am left behind.

Add to it all such rising dangers as total prohibition,
and the female franchise, the daylight saving, and eugenic
marriage, together with proportional representation, the
initiative and the referendum, and the duty of the citizen
to take an intelligent interest in politics--and I admit
that I shall not be sorry to go away from here.

But before I _do_ go, I have one hope. I understand that
down in Hayti things are very different. Bull fights,
cock fights, dog fights, are openly permitted. Business
never begins till eleven in the morning. Everybody sleeps
after lunch, and the bars remain open all night. Marriage
is but a casual relation. In fact, the general condition
of morality, so they tell me, is lower in Hayti than it
has been anywhere since the time of Nero. Me for Hayti.

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