admit that you are not tired (because you are not, you know), and
that you arrange your evening so that it is not cut in the middle by
a meal. By so doing you will have a clear expanse of at least three
hours. I do not suggest that you should employ three hours every
night of your life in using up your mental energy. But I do suggest
that you might, for a commencement, employ an hour and a half every
other evening in some important and consecutive cultivation of the
mind. You will still be left with three evenings for friends,
bridge, tennis, domestic scenes, odd reading, pipes, gardening,
pottering, and prize competitions. You will still have the terrific
wealth of forty-five hours between 2 p.m. Saturday and 10 a.m.
Monday. If you persevere you will soon want to pass four evenings,
and perhaps five, in some sustained endeavour to be genuinely alive.
And you will fall out of that habit of muttering to yourself at
11.15 p.m., "Time to be thinking about going to bed." The man who
begins to go to bed forty minutes before he opens his bedroom door
is bored; that is to say, he is not living.

But remember, at the start, those ninety nocturnal minutes thrice a
week must be the most important minutes in the ten thousand and
eighty. They must be sacred, quite as sacred as a dramatic
rehearsal or a tennis match. Instead of saying, "Sorry I can't see
you, old chap, but I have to run off to the tennis club," you must
say, "...but I have to work." This, I admit, is intensely difficult
to say. Tennis is so much more urgent than the immortal soul.



VI