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Evening Post, Volume CIX, Issue 100, 30 April 1930, Page 16

AMUSING VACANT MINDS

ENGLISH WRITER'S VIEWS

It is impossibJo to glance at the papers nowadays without discovering that some new pinnacle- oi' fatuity has l>ecn stormed, writes Ivor Brown in the "Manchester Guardian." Hero somebody is pushing a pea up a mountain ■with Iris nose; there somebody has de]iverod a non-stop oration of 4S hours while standing on ono leg. and throwing up and 'catching three tennis balls. And thisj of cousc, is a record. Previous i orators who stood on one leg and ' juggled with tennis balls broke down at the pitiable achievement of a mere 46 hours. T'icso affairs aio usually called Marathons, which is a trifle hard on the purposeful and prodigious gallop of the runner who took the great news to Athens. America has its spitting Marathons, and I read not long ago of an American Sunday School which knocked the Baltimore pole-sitters right off their topmost perch of lunacy; it organised-a competition to discover which of its heaven-aspiring scholais could display the greatest number of warts. I confess I made up tho orator, but tho others Jire reported fact. Yet I, who write in this superior fashion have just been playing Patience, and who am I to crawl between heaven and earth if I cannot find better occupation for. idle hand and mind? Crosswords, after all, make lexicographers of us all. They have taught_me, for instance, not only such rarefied wisdom as the philosophic significance of acatalepsy, but that, a Jow' fellow may be called a snudge, a-word which I hereby reserve for him -who sets the Wednesday puzzle in this paper. Biidge is a school of manners as well as of memory. Mario Lloyd, impersonating a poor penniless wretch deserted by her husband and thrown down the stairs by the landlord, a woman without so much hope in tho world as tho price of a beer,' used to say, "Well, I suppose all these things arc sent to try us." Tor tho same high ethical purpose- do certain bridge partners exist, in which category of temper-testers we are all properly placcl by our comapnions. But Patience!-A lonely as well as a.| 3ack-wit affair, as sad a corrupter of morals as solitary soaking, since it creates a kind of teetotal sottishness in which a man will start to cheat fortune at cards from a drowsy despair of ever doing what is melancholy enough when done. There is, I believe, ono variety of tho vice called "Idiot's Joy," and if there is not there ought to "be. For tho phrase sums up not merely a game of cards but a considerable slice of life. And so, I suppose, we must not jeer at Patience after all, for Idiot's Joy posseses most of us in ono way or another. Aristocracy, which nowadays means simply the people who get into the news, exists to gratify national idiocy and thereby serve the popular pleasure. It is not only the maid that milks and docs the meanest chores who is ravenously curious about who's living with whom; the severest will look at the "Daily Snob" and find themselves agreeably informed by the latest tattle of a ducal wedding, and it is obvious that millions of people who vote Labour at elections will not read a newspaper unless it presents them with ceaseless portraits of leathery ladies equipped for tho j-acos or tho chases, and provides a constant personnel of tho Bottlo Party world. Let us cut no capers of superiority. Worst, of all (and very common) is he who'will not buy his Idiot's Joy in open market, but sneaks a glance in tho club or when he finds it on somebody else's table. SLAVES OP PURPOSE. But the honest addict of the Joy, be it Patience or Such-gossip or any other senseless' means, of ..murdering time, has a defence. The nioro civilised we become, he can argue, the less are wr the slaves of Purpose. Anthropology proves conclusively that the more primitive man is tho nioro. purposeful lie is. His whole life is one drudgery of calculation. His reasonings may be ■wrong, his scheming the very ecstasy of a futile superstition, but he never stops scheming, and he will value nothing-which does not serve his find, ■which,,-,is tp keep and prolong Life. Moderns wear jewels -"or beauty's sake; to the savage they are Life-givers, and had not gold and pearls been deemed to be tho amulets of immortality they might never have beep esteemed, at all, for neither is particularly beautiful. Play-acting undoubtedly began,as the pursuit of Life; resurrection dramas 'are the fount and essence of the matter, the. tribe believing that if they acted the. King's triumph'over death they might assist him "to be immortal and so continuo his beneficent gifts of power .and cohesion to the race. Even games have been traced down to ritual purposes. 'Wherever we. look into pichistory we,find a relentless concentration of effort on the end, which is Life and still more Life. Never tho whimsical, always the purposeful; Longfellow, with Lis "Life is real! life- is earliest! And the grave ib not its goal," was not describing our- own ago in the least, but driving into the' very heart of man's existence before tho discoveries came and tho cultures Ibegan. "FOR REASONS' SAKE." 1 Civilisation, in short, removes this iftrcadful preoccupation with Life. It gives liberties and leisures of a kind. It permits us to play the fool, even to p]ay Pationce. It is only when logic h,as reached some considerable- development that we are able to demobilise it and do the pointless, purposeless thing. It needs a rationalist' to allow 1 That capability and god-like reason t To fust in us unused. ■Without some standard of sanity there can. be no Idiot's Joy.' The trouble is, of, course, that some people, having demobilised reaton, never recant from farewell to arms, and continuo to pjirsuc the pointless for the rest of .their days. But even so they serve a' purpose. Idiotically pursuing their career of a lunatic gadding, tliey become Idiot's Joy for all the rest of us md, provide an endless photographic flood of glossy beauties, showing their flossy horses, of gay companioTis in yachting caps or Lido pyjamas, of paragraphs and gossip and. matrimonial conjecture —in short, of all tho nonsensical reading which makes the 'bus «r train journey rather nioro supportable than it would otherwise lip. Russia, I suppose, .has abolished Idiot's Joy. There everything is strenuous, purposeful, and intense. Exchange ."Communism" for "Life" and you have tho archaic state of ceaseless endeavour once again. Theie is something rather noble about this ictun: to the primitive. It fits in with ttie mummification and the- worship of the Dead King, Lenin. Nobody surely in ipost-Chekovian Bussia has timo and liberty to moon, much less to play Patience. There are no photographers $$ a hundred humans, a hundred horses, and forty.hounds setting out to pursuej line small fox. But I have a notion that j Stvery cunning Communist would create a'small conclave of "aristos" purely for photographic purposes. He might even encourage ' Polo-sitting and .Patience. lor the fact of the, matter sterns to be that we moderns canribt Keep it up like the cave-man; wo caniipt be always planning the End. . We inußt be idiots for a while for reasons' Pj^Mfc;., -~ ...... ...• .■■■.■ r .'.■■.■■■■■■•'•