elf--to increase one's
knowledge--may well be slaked quite apart from literature. With the
various ways of slaking I shall deal later. Here I merely point out to
those who have no natural sympathy with literature that literature is
not the only well.

III

PRECAUTIONS BEFORE BEGINNING

Now that I have succeeded (if succeeded I have) in persuading you to
admit to yourself that you are constantly haunted by a suppressed
dissatisfaction with your own arrangement of your daily life; and that
the primal cause of that inconvenient dissatisfaction is the feeling
that you are every day leaving undone something which you would like to
do, and which, indeed, you are always hoping to do when you have "more
time"; and now that I have drawn your attention to the glaring,
dazzling truth that you never will have "more time," since you already
have all the time there is--you expect me to let you into some
wonderful secret by which you may at any rate approach the ideal of a
perfect arrangement of the day, and by which, therefore, that haunting,
unpleasant, daily disappointment of things left undone will be got rid
of!

I have found no such wonderful secret. Nor do I expect to find it, nor
do I expect that anyone else will ever find it. It is undiscovered.
When you first began to gather my drift, perhaps there was a
resurrection of hope in your breast. Perhaps you said to yourself,
"This man will show me an easy, unfatiguing way of doing what I have so
long in vain wished to do." Alas, no! The fact is that there is no
easy way, no royal road. The path to Mecca is extremely hard and
stony, and the worst of it is that you never quite get there after all.

The most important preliminary to the task of arranging one's life so
that one may live fully and comfortably within one's daily budget of
twenty-four hours is the calm realisation of the extreme difficulty of
the task, of the sacrifices and the endless effort which it demands. I
cannot too strongly insist on this.

If you imagine that you will be able to achieve your ideal by
ingeniously planning out a time-table 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.

It is very sad, is it not, very depressing and sombre? And yet I th