Bennett on the evening hours
📚SOURCE
💎PERMANENT NOTES
🧵SYNTHESIS
Public domain (1908), so the highlights are quoted exactly. Everything else is my summary of 📕 How to Live on 24 Hours a Day.
Bennett writes for the clerk who takes the 09:10 into London and feels, vaguely, that his life is happening somewhere else. His argument has two steps. First, time is the one income that is paid equally to everyone and cannot be saved, borrowed or stolen. Second, the ordinary worker treats the eight hours at the office as the day and everything around it as margin. Bennett reverses that. The sixteen hours from leaving work to returning are the real day, a day inside the day, and nobody is paying for them.
His prescription is modest to the point of comedy: ninety minutes on three evenings a week, plus the morning train. Start small, because a grand plan that fails teaches you to stop planning.
Bossy, dated, and right about evenings.
✨KEY IDEAS
“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!”
“We have, and we have always had, all the time there is.”
“You cannot waste to-morrow; it is kept for you.”
“Beware of undertaking too much at the start. Be content with quite a little.”
📝READING NOTES
Who he is talking to
A salaried man in 1908 with a season ticket and a vague dissatisfaction. Swap the train for tram line 4 and it is uncomfortably close. 🏛️ Arnold Bennett was a novelist who wrote this as a string of newspaper pieces, and it has the tone of someone who has been asked the same question at too many dinners.
The argument, in order
- The daily miracle. Time arrives fresh each morning in equal amounts. See 💬 You wake up in the morning, and lo.
- The wish to do more. Most people carry a low ache that they are not using their lives. He takes the ache seriously and refuses to flatter it.
- Precautions. Do not start with a heroic programme. Expect your own nature to resist.
- The cause of the trouble. We call the working hours the day and treat the rest as leftover.
- The remedy. Treat the hours outside work as a complete day in themselves. Claim a small, fixed part of the evening, and use the commute to practise holding the mind on one subject.
- Warnings. Do not become a prig about it. Do not let the plan own you.
What I take
The evening is the unpaid part. Halden buys my days. The course on Tuesdays and the newsletter both live after 18:00, and they are the two things this year I would describe as mine.
Small and fixed. 🔹 Write 300 words is set deliberately low for this reason. He would call 300 words an ambitious start.
Where I part company
The book assumes someone else cooks the dinner and washes up. His clerk comes home to a meal. Take the cooking, the laundry and the Saturday clean out of my sixteen hours and the day inside the day is rather shorter. He also thinks tiredness after work is mostly imagination. It is not, and February will no doubt prove it.
He is dismissive of novels as serious evening reading, which is rich from a novelist. And his mornings go by in a paragraph, where mine do most of the work.
What it produced
💎 Evenings are the only hours nobody is paying for, written the same Sunday as the decision not to rebuild.
Added 30 March: three bad weeks in February and the evenings were the first thing to go. He did not warn me that an unpaid hour is also an undefended one.
Related notes
- 🏛️ Arnold Bennett
- 💬 You wake up in the morning, and lo
- 🔹 Write 300 words
Reading record
- Times read: once
🗣️IN SHORT
- In : How to Live on 24 Hours a Day, all twelve short chapters
- Bennett argues that : the hours outside paid work are a whole day in their own right, and that a life is made or wasted there
- by stating that : time is issued equally and daily and cannot be hoarded, that we wrongly treat the working day as the only day, and that a small fixed claim on the evening, begun modestly, is enough to change the rest