R2E Excerpt #54: "The chief beauty about time is that you cannot waste it in advance"

This ReWindsday, I revisit the smart things said by one of my favorite authors—a guy you've probably never heard of. Literary immortality is rough on dead people. WRITTEN & ILLUSTRATED by PETER MOORE

When the mood strikes, I run excerpts here on substack from A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG NINCOMPOOP, my coming-of-age-travel-memoir-with-funny-drawings. (The first entry is here. Most recent one is here. If you become a paid subscriber, you can access the complete archive here!) It details the story of my road through Paris, London, and god help me, Zagreb, in search of the ultimate destination: a life worth living. The story so far: Young Peter arrived in Paris, occupied a dorm room at the Alliance Française language school, tiptoed out onto the Boulevard Raspail and the Paris Metro, and made the first steps on the road to elsewhere.

Then I went to England. Big mistake. But aren’t mistakes the first step toward anyplace worth going?

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ALL THOSE WHO WANDER ARE NOT LOST, says that reassuring poster bought by lost people. I myself couldn’t have been considered lost at this time in my life—my early twenties—because that might imply that I’d had a path that I misplaced.

Not so!

Sure, there was undergraduate education, which I pursued with straight-line purpose and attention. But that particular conveyor belt is built to end at the edge of a stage, followed by a nudge into nothingness (adulthood). Those four years are life’s pause button, to allow an 18 to metamorphose into a 22, at which point you’re compelled to get on with it already.

I couldn’t have achieved more, or less, in my four years at Bates College. I took all the required courses, including gym, and all of that prepared me for god knows what. Freedom’s just another word for no more courses left to choose.

I was, of course, full to the brim with entitlement and still had chits to cash, plus my head was crammed with memorized poetry and general hifaluting. Thank goodness I had that six grand from grampa, or I might have had to join the military for a seek-and-destroy coming-of-age.  

Or maybe teach? As if there were a subject I knew well enough to instruct anybody. I was barely past Suckling 101. I hadn’t even been breastfed—it was out of fashion when I popped out—so I couldn’t have found a nipple with a map and a Eurail pass.

My thesis advisor was a scholar of the novelist Arnold Bennett, best known (if at all, now) for his Clayhanger trilogy. It doesn’t ring a bell? He died in 1931, having completed 34 novels, seven short story collections, thirteen plays, and a million words in journal entries. (Big deal—I’ve written 6 million! Every day since 12 October 1978!)

So if you haven’t heard of him, that’s on you. He was holding up his end of the bargain. 

The key moment in Clayhanger, book one, comes as the hero, Edwin Clayhanger, uses a stout leather strap to secure a juddering printing press to the roof of the building that houses it, and prevents it from bringing down the whole operation. Edwin was recognized as the savior of the family printing business, and thus free to tackle life’s domestic judderings, in three volumes. 

Similarly, Edwin launched my professor, who attached an academic strap to Bennett’s extensive life and letters (Dickens was spoken for), to keep him suspended in the dead-white-guy pantheon. My professor befriended the author’s widow, who handed over a volume of his letters as an insurance policy for her late husband’s literary reputation. He eventually sold these letters to collectors, and not a moment too soon: the most common descriptor for him now is “unfairly neglected.”

Ars longa my ass. I’d go for vita longa any day.

Bennett did carpe his diem, just after the turn of the last century, as I would learn when I read his still-resonant How to Live on 24-Hours a Day, a short prescription for a full life. He practically invented the self-help genre with this book, for which I’m grateful; I would make a career out of writing all sorts of life instructions, for Men’s Health magazine. (Favorite tip ever: Rotate the rearview mirror in your car upward, to make sure you sit up straight at the wheel. Try it!)

But Bennett had beaten me to the prescriptive punch by ninety-five years, publishing How to Live in January 1901. In fact you might wish to head over to his book right now, because Bennett has all sorts of useful ideas about how to better spend your time. Compared with reading this, I mean. 

“The chief beauty about time,” he wrote, “is that you cannot waste it in advance. The next year, the next day, the next hour are lying ready for you, as perfect, as unspoiled, as if you had never wasted or misapplied a single moment in all your life. You can turn over a new leaf every hour if you choose.”

My professor made out OK by turning over Bennett’s old leaves to the letter collectors. With the proceeds, he was able to purchase a delightful little cottage in the town of Amberley, forty-five miles south of London. When my professor heard that I’d be knocking about in England, he suggested that I stop down for a visit. A safe offer, he must have thought: Why would I visit his sleepy flower garden when I could roust about in London?

But London turned out to be full of Londoners, of all things. 

And so to Amberley, of all places.

I rang up my professor’s wife, Elinor, whom I sincerely hope was consulted before her husband invited me to invade her home. Elinor graciously accepted my visit on her husband’s behalf, as he was stuck among the undergrads in Lewiston, Maine for several more weeks. And so I escaped via southbound train, and was eventually set down in the Amberley train station, adjacent to the River Arun, which frequently flooded into a picturesque swamp called the Wild Brooks. 

European trains were a public utility and gathering place, and I was a rolling amateur anthropologist. I relished the chance to observe multiple generations and life-choices in the rolling cultural dioramas of a train car. 

I was fascinated, in particular, by the UK-equivalent of my father—executive types with brollies, twiddling their mustaches and scowling at the Financial Times. That newspaper began printing on orange-tinted paper back in 1893, to distinguish it from a rival, and to save money on expensively bleached paper. Now they pay dearly to maintain the tradition, which goes to show: legacy can cost you. 

Also with me on the train: 

The hippie daughters of those mustache-twiddlers, jiggling without foundation undergarments to-and-fro from university. 

Down-at-heels traveling businessmen, reading tabloids with half-naked “birds” on Page Three. These buskers were dressed in the cheap, clashing costumes that passed as business wear in the late 70s, with bad haircuts and aggressive sideburns creeping down their jawlines.

Schoolboys, in uniform, traveling in packs, returning from cultural larks in London. 

Just-off-the-boat immigrants, pushing tea carts, hailing from countries from the list of formerly oppressed colonies. I hung in suspense for their arrival at my seat, bearing McVities biscuits and the entire Cadbury line.  

Motherly types, who watched my unstealable stuff when I went to the loo to process oceans of milky tea.

Plus, other traveling Americans, whom I avoided whenever possible. If these people were headed in the same direction I was, how special could my destination possibly be? 

When needed, I’d muster distance by pulling out my journal and scribbling purposefully—to record the scene and set myself apart from it. 

“If you imagine that you will be able to achieve your ideal by ingeniously planning out a timetable 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.”
― Arnold Bennett, How to Live on 24 Hours a Day

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