These particulars appear so foolish and so trivial that most persons
will find them ridiculous, and even the most sympathetic will perhaps
wonder why they are recorded. They were, however, far from trivial to
me. The marooned seaman saves his sanity by cutting notches in a
stick, the solitary prisoner by friendship with a mouse; and when life
is reduced to the last exiguity of narrowness, the interests of life
will be narrow too. No writer, whose work is familiar to me, has ever
yet described with unsparing fidelity the kind of misery which lies in
having to do precisely the same things at the same hour, through long
and consecutive periods of time. The hours then become a dead weight
which oppresses the spirit to the point of torture. Life itself
resembles those dreadful dreams of childhood, in which we see the
ceiling and the walls of the room contract round one's helpless and
immobile form. Blessed is he who has variety in his life: thrice
blessed is he who has both freedom and variety: but the subordinate
toiler in the vast mechanism of a great city has neither. He will sit
at the same desk, gaze upon the same unending rows of figures, do, in
fact, the same things year in and year out till his youth has withered
into age. He himself becomes little better than a mechanism. There is
no form of outdoor employment of which this can be said. The life of
the agricultural labourer, so often pitied for its monotony, is variety
itself compared with the life of the commercial clerk. The labourer's
tasks are at least changed by the seasons; but time brings no such
diversion to the clerk. It is this horrible monotony which so often
makes the clerk a foul-minded creature; driven in upon himself, he has
to create some kind of drama for his instincts and imaginations, and
often from the sorriest material. When I played single-handed cribbage
with the few trivial interests which I knew, I at least took an
innocent diversion; and I may claim that my absurd fancies injured no
one, and were certainly of some service to myself.