open air. There has spread abroad along with the so-called physical efficiency a perfect passion for information. Somehow if a man’s stomach is empty and his head clear as a bell, and if he won’t drink and won’t smoke, he reaches out for information. He wants facts. He reads the newspapers all through, instead of only reading the headings. He clamours for articles filled with statistics about illiteracy and alien immigration and the number of battleships in the Japanese navy.
I know quite a lot of men who have actually bought the new Encyclopædia Britannica. What is more, they read the thing. They sit in their apartments at night with a glass of water at their elbow reading the encyclopædia. They say that it is literally filled with facts. Other men spend their time reading the Statistical Abstract of the United States (they say the figures in it are great) and the Acts of Congress, and the list of Presidents since Washington (or was it Washington?).
Spending their evenings thus, and topping it off with a cold baked apple, and sleeping out in the snow, they go to work in the morning, so they tell me, with a positive sense of exhilaration. I have no doubt that they do. But, for me, I confess that once and for all I am out of it. I am left behind.
Add to it all such rising dangers as total
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