Twenty years ago I
knew a man called Jiggins, who had the Health Habit. He used to take a cold plunge
every morning. He said it opened his pores. After it he took a hot sponge. He
said it closed the pores. He got so that he could open and shut his pores at
will. Jiggins used to stand and breathe
at an open window for half an hour before dressing. He said it expanded his
lungs. He might, of course, have had it done in a shoe-store with a
boot-stretcher, but after all it cost him nothing this way, and what is half an
hour? After he had got his undershirt
on, Jiggins used to hitch himself up like a dog in harness and do Sandow
exercises. He did them forwards, backwards, and hind-side up. He spent all his time at this
kind of thing. In his spare time at the office, he used to lie on his stomach
on the floor and see if he could lift himself up with his knuckles. If he
could, then he tried some other way until he found one that he couldn’t do.
Then he would spend the rest of his lunch hour on his stomach, perfectly happy. In the evenings in his room he
used to lift iron bars, cannon-balls, heave dumbbells, and haul himself up to
the ceiling with his teeth. You could hear the thumps half a mile. He liked it. He spent half the night slinging
himself around his room. He said it made his brain clear. When he got his brain
perfectly clear, he went to bed and slept. As soon as he woke, he began
clearing it again. Jiggins is dead. He was, of
course, a pioneer, but the fact that he dumb-belled himself to death at an
early age does not prevent a whole generation of young men from following in
his path. They are ridden by the Health
Mania. They make themselves a nuisance. They get up at impossible hours.
They go out in silly little suits and run Marathon heats before breakfast. They
chase around barefoot to get the dew on their feet. They hunt for ozone. They
bother about pepsin. They won’t eat meat because it has too much nitrogen. They
won’t eat fruit because it hasn’t any. They prefer albumen and starch and
nitrogen to huckleberry pie and doughnuts. They won’t drink water out of a tap.
They won’t eat sardines out of a can. They won’t use oysters out of a pail.
They won’t drink milk out of a glass. They are afraid of alcohol in any shape. Yes,
sir, afraid. “Cowards.” And after all their fuss they
presently incur some simple old-fashioned illness and die like anybody else. Now people of this sort have no
chance to attain any great age. They are on the wrong track. Listen. Do you want to live to be
really old, to enjoy a grand, green, exuberant, boastful old age and to make
yourself a nuisance to your whole neighbourhood with your reminiscences? Then cut out all this nonsense.
Cut it out. Get up in the morning at a sensible hour. The time to get up is
when you have to, not before. If your office opens at eleven, get up at
ten-thirty. Take your chance on ozone. There isn’t any such thing anyway. Or,
if there is, you can buy a Thermos bottle full for five cents, and put it on a
shelf in your cupboard. If your work begins at seven in the morning, get up at
ten minutes to, but don’t be liar enough to say that you like it. It isn’t
exhilarating, and you know it. Also, drop all that cold-bath
business. You never did it when you were a boy. Don’t be a fool now. If you
must take a bath (you don’t really need to), take it warm. The pleasure of
getting out of a cold bed and creeping into a hot bath beats a cold plunge to
death. In any case, stop gassing about your tub and your “shower,” as if you
were the only man who ever washed. So much for that point. Now take the question of food. Eat what you want. Eat lots of
it. Yes, eat too much of it. Eat till you can just stagger across the room with
it and prop it up against a sofa cushion. Eat everything that you like until
you can’t eat any more. The only test is, can you pay for it? If you can’t pay
for it, don’t eat it. And listen--don’t worry as to whether your food contains
starch, or albumen, or gluten, or nitrogen. If you are a damn fool enough to
want these things, go and buy them and eat all you want of them. Go to a
laundry and get a bag of starch, and eat your fill of it. Eat it, and take a
good long drink of glue after it, and a spoonful of Portland cement. That will
gluten you, good and solid. If you like nitrogen, go and get
a druggist to give you a canful of it at the soda counter, and let you sip it
with a straw. Only don’t think that you can mix all these things up with your
food. There isn’t any nitrogen or phosphorus or albumen in ordinary things to
eat. In any decent household all that sort of stuff is washed out in the
kitchen sink before the food is put on the table. And just one word about fresh air and exercise. Don’t bother with either of them. Get your room full of good air, then shut up the windows and keep it. It will keep for years. Anyway, don’t keep using your lungs all the time. Let them rest. As for exercise, if you have to take it, take it and put up with it. But as long as you have the price of a hack and can hire other people to play baseball for you and run races and do gymnastics when you sit in the shade and smoke and watch them--great heavens, what more do you want? |