On Nothing and Kindred Subjects

Among the sadder and smaller pleasures of this world I count this pleasure: the pleasure of taking up one's pen.

It has been said by very many people that there is a tangible pleasure in the mere act of writing: in choosing and arranging words. It has been denied by many. It is affirmed and denied in the life of Doctor Johnson, and for my part I would say that it is very true in some rare moods and wholly false in most others. However, of writing and the pleasure in it I am not writing here (with pleasure), but of the pleasure of taking up one's pen, which is quite another matter.

Note what the action means. You are alone. Even if the room is crowded (as was the smoking-room in the G.W.R. Hotel, at Paddington, only the other day, when I wrote my "Statistical Abstract of Christendom"), even if the room is crowded, you must have made yourself alone to be able to write at all. You must have built up some kind of wall and isolated your mind. You are alone, then; and that is the beginning.

If you consider at what pains men are to be alone: how they climb mountains, enter prisons, profess monastic vows, put on eccentric daily habits, and seclude themselves in the garrets of a

That has perished, and I mean to mourn it all the days of my life. Pray do not interfere with that peculiar ritual."

When I was a boy I knew Nature as a child knows its nurse, and Tea I denounced for a drug. I found to support this fine instinct many arguments, all of which are still sound, though not one of them would prevent me now from drinking my twentieth cup. It was introduced late and during a corrupt period. It was an exotic. It was a sham exhilarant to which fatal reactions could not but attach. It was no part of the Diet of the Natural Man. The two nations that alone consume it—the English and the Chinese—are become, by its baneful influence on the imagination, the most easily deceived in the world. Their politics are a mass of bombastic illusions. Also it dries their skins. It tans the liver, hardens the coats of the stomach, makes the brain feverishly active, rots the nerve-springs; all that is still true. Nevertheless I now drink it, and shall drink it; for of all the effects of Age none is more profound than this: that it leads men to the worship of some one spirit less erect than the Angels. A care, an egotism, an irritability with regard to details, an anxious craving, a consummate satisfaction in the performance of the due rites, an ecstasy of habit, all proclaim the senile heresy, the material Religion. I confess to Tea.

Then also once on a long ride (yes, "ride". Why not?) through Lincolnshire I heard two men of the smaller commercial or salaried kind at issue. The first, who had a rather peevish face, was looking gloomily out of window and was saying, "Denmark has it: Greece has it—why shouldn't we have it? Eh? America has it and so's Germany—why shouldn't we have it?" Then after a pause he added, "Even France has it—why haven't we got it?" He spoke as though he wouldn't stand it much longer, and as though France were the last straw.

The other man was excitable and had an enormous newspaper in his hand, and he answered in a high voice, "'Cause we're too sensible, that's why! 'Cause we know what we're about, we do."

The other man said, "Ho! Do we?"

The second man answered, "Yes: we do. What made England?"

"Gord," said the first man.

This brought the second man up all standing and nearly carried away his fore-bob-stay. He answered slowly—

"Well … yes … in a manner of speaking. But what I meant to say was like this, that what made England was Free Trade!" Here he slapped one hand on to the other with a noise like that of a pistol, and added heavily: "And what's more, I can prove it."

The first man, who was now entrenched in his position, said again, "Ho! Can you?" and sneered.

There was once a man called Mahmoud. He had other names, such as Ali, Akbar, and Shmaeil, and so forth, with which I will not trouble you, because in very short stories it is important not to confuse the mind. I have been assured of this by many authorities, some of whom make a great deal of money by short stories, and all of whom know a great deal about the way in which they ought to be written.

Now I come to think of it, I very much doubt whether this is a short story at all, for it has no plot so far and I do not see any plot developing. No matter. The thing is to say what one has to say humbly but fully. Providence will look after the rest.

So, as I was saying, there was a man called Mahmoud. He lived in a country entirely made of sand. There were hills which on the maps were called mountains, but when you came to look at them they were only a lot more sand, and there was nothing about them except an aspect of sand heaped up. You may say, "How, then, did Mahmoud build a house?" He did not. He lived in a tent. "But," you continue, "what did he do about drinking?" Well, it was Mahmoud's habit to go to a place where he knew that by scratching a little he would find bad water, and there he would scratch a little and find it, and, being an abstemious man, he needed but a drop.