hunger; how to acquire and
constantly renew a stock of other portions of dead animals and plants in
which one can envelop oneself in order not to die of cold; how to
procure the exclusive right of entry into certain huts where one may
sleep and eat without being rained upon by the clouds of heaven. And so
forth. And when one has realised this ambition, there comes the desire
to be able to double the operation and do it, not for oneself alone, but
for oneself and another. Marriage! But no scientific sustained attention
is yet given to the real business of living, of smooth intercourse, of
self-expression, of conscious adaptation to environment--in brief, to
the study of the machine. At thirty the chances are that a man will
understand better the draught of a chimney than his own respiratory
apparatus--to name one of the simple, obvious things--and as for
understanding the working of his own brain--what an idea! As for the
skill to avoid the waste of power involved by friction in the business
of living, do we give an hour to it in a month? Do we ever at all
examine it save in an amateurish and clumsy fashion? A young lady
produces a water-colour drawing. 'Very nice!' we say, and add, to
ourselves, 'For an amateur.' But our living is more amateurish than that
young lady's drawing; though surely we ought every one of us to be
professionals at living!

When we have been engaged in the preliminaries to living for about
fifty-five years, we begin to think about slacking off. Up till this
period our reason for not having scientifically studied the art of
living--the perfecting and use of the finer parts of the machine--is not
that we have lacked leisure (most of us have enormous heaps of leisure),
but that we have simply been too absorbed in the preliminaries, have, in
fact, treated the preliminaries to the business as the business itself.
Then at fifty-five we ought at last to begin to live our lives with
professional skill, as a professional painter paints pictures. Yes, but
we can't. It is too late then. Neither painters, nor acrobats, nor any
professionals can be formed at the age of fifty-five. Thus we finish
our lives amateurishly, as we have begun them. And when the machine
creaks and sets our teeth on edge, or refuses to obey the steering-wheel
and deposits us in the ditch, we say: 'Can't be helped!' or 'Doesn't
matter! It will be all the same a hundred years hence!' or: 'I must make
the best of things.' And we try to b