THE MIND AT EASE

Wairarapa Times-Age, 13 March 1939, Page 9

THE MIND AT EASE

IS LIFE LESS STRENUOUS? “Ours is an age surfeited with gadgets for. making life easier. The amount of effort of which human beings appear nowadays to be relieved ought to be enough to set an Atlantic liner in motion,’’ says the “Evening News,” of Lbndon. “Lifts and moving staircases take us up and down. We press a button and light floods into a dark room. We turn a knob and we listen to Beethoven being played five hundred miles away. There never was a time in human history when material comfort was so actively and ingeniously promoted. Sometimes it seems indeed as if we are apt to confuse comfort with civilisation. Yet has life in fact been made any less strenuous? The modern age, in its pursuit and attainment of material comfort, seems to have forgotten the mind at ease. It sits in deeply soothing armchairs, but its spirit is still restless. There can be no swift reconciliation to this contrast. It is foolish, as some moralists do, to abuse material ease just because it is material ease. There is nothing essentially harmful in it as such. But the human race must learn—it is slowly learning—to make use of the enrichment and comfort which it has been given, not to make life easier and more slothful .but to make it fuller and happier.”