I am a collector of ideas. This year, my focus is in collecting "beautiful sentences." What's beautiful? I decide, and I guess that's the beauty of it. I read this passage this morning, and I keep coming back to it because A) I want this schedule. I'm tired of running all the time. I am tired of noise. I am tired of working until 9 every night. I am tired. I want all the things in this schedule: reasonable work hours, reading, walks in nature. . .and solitude; His distinction between being selfish and self-centered is to be noted. I shared this passage with some people today, and one noted: "I like the idea that self centered means your world is centered on yourself, but being selfish means you're doing what you need to do to take care of yourself and fill yourself so you have the capacity to be centered on more important things than yourself."
Here is the passage (I cut out some names; such specificity is confusing if you haven't read the larger work). Decide for yourself.
"We now settled into a routine which has ever since served in my mind as an archetype, so that what I still mean when I speak of a “normal” day (and lament that normal days are so rare) is a day of the [Bookham] pattern. For if I could please myself I would always live as I lived there.
I would choose always to breakfast at exactly eight and to be at my desk by nine, there to read or write till one. If a cup of good tea or coffee could be brought me about eleven, so much the better. A step or so out of doors for a pint of beer would not do quite so well; for a man does not want to drink alone and if you meet a friend in the tap-room the break is likely to be extended beyond its ten minutes.
At one precisely lunch should be on the table; and by two at the latest I would be on the road. Not, except at rare intervals, with a friend. Walking and talking are two very great pleasures, but it is a mistake to combine them. Our own noise blots out the sounds and silences of the out-door world; and talking leads almost inevitably to smoking, and then farewell to nature as far as one of our senses is concerned.
The return from the walk, and the arrival of tea, should be exactly coincident, and not later than a quarter past four. Tea should be taken in solitude, as I took it at Bookham on those (happily numerous) occasions. For eating and reading are two pleasures that combine admirably. Of course not all books are suitable for meal-time reading. It would be a kind of blasphemy to read poetry at table. What one wants is a gossipy, formless book which can be opened anywhere.
At five a man should be at work again, and at it till seven. Then, at the evening meal and after, comes the time for talk, or, failing that, for lighter reading; and unless you are making a night of it with your cronies (and at Bookham I had none) there is no reason why you should ever be in bed later than eleven. But when is a man to write his letters? You forget that I am describing the happy life I led, or the ideal life I would live now if I could. And it is an essential of the happy life that a man would have almost no mail and never dread the postman’s knock.
Such is my ideal, and such then (almost) was the reality, of “settled, calm, Epicurean life”. It is no doubt for my own good that I have been so generally prevented from leading it, for it is a life almost entirely selfish. Selfish, not self centered: for in such a life my mind would be directed towards a thousand things, not one of which is myself. The distinction is not unimportant. One of the happiest men and most pleasing companions I have ever known was intensely selfish. On the other hand I have known people capable of real sacrifice whose lives were nevertheless a misery to themselves and to others, because self-concern and self-pity filled all their thoughts. Either condition will destroy the soul in the end. But till the end, give me the man who takes the best of everything (even at my expense) and then talks of other things, rather than the man who serves me and talks of himself, and whose very kindnesses are a continual reproach, a continual demand for pity, gratitude, and admiration."
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