It’s begun to rain. I think I’ll be off. I do hate anachronisms.
III.
ON SELF-DECEPTION: TOGETHER WITH THE DREAM OF
THE DEAN’S PREPARATIONS.
THIS morning, because the air was fresh, and the sun was bright, and I had eaten too much breakfast, it seemed to be an excellent thing to cut all lectures and to loaf in the Backs. Few boats are there in the morning, and I have found, when my canoe takes me out, that the fewer the boats the less the unpleasantness. I can run into a bridge, but a bridge cannot run into me; and a bridge always takes my apologies in a nice spirit. The afternoon loafers on the river are not yet sufficiently educated to understand that a Canadian canoe must go its own way, and that any attempt to control it is a baseness.
The other afternoon my canoe got a little humorous. It saw a man on in front of us working hard in one of those vessels that went a thousand miles down the Jordan—or something to that effect. I knew what my canoe would do. It broke into a canter, caught the absolute stranger in the back of the neck, and knocked him into the water. You would have expected the absolute stranger to have come up, breathing the Englishman’s Shortest Prayer. He did not. He apologised for having been in my way, said that it was entirely his own fault, and hoped that he had not inconvenienced me. I shrugged my shoulders and forgave him, with considerable hauteur.
But my boat got Remorse badly. It did not want to live any more, and tried to knock its brains out against Clare Bridge. I soothed it, and tied it up. Canadian canoes are such sensitive things.
This sort of incident cannot happen when one cuts lectures to go on the river in the morning. And one does more work. You take your Plato’s “Phædo,” and you really enjoy it. If there’s any word you don’t know, you leave it; if there’s any sentence you can’t understand, you don’t worry about it; and if there’s any word you can understand, it goes home to you more. That’s the right spirit. That’s the way the ancient Greeks took their language. What did they know about dictionaries and grammars and cribs? And then, after a couple of minutes, one pitches the “Phædo” into the bows of the boat, and a great Peace falls on one’s soul.
My Better Self does not agree with me on these points; but I had words with my Better Self this morning, and since then we have not been on speaking terms. I find it impossible to convince my Better Self of great truths; I could deceive my Better Self, which is a common practice, but I will not do it. I have seen men do it; and I have been very, very sorry for them. I have known a man, who had previously been honest, commence to keep an average of the amount of work he did per diem. The way he faked that average would have brought a blush to the cheek of the chartered libertine, and made the chartered accountant moan for humanity. The first week gave a daily average of 2 hours 20·5 minutes. In the second week we were asked to believe that he had done rather more than ten hours a day. That man drives a cab now: self-deception never pays. Another man, who was quite a friend of mine, liked pork chops. He pretended that he didn’t, and made himself believe that he didn’t. Why? Simply and solely because he once wrote a poem—and published it—which began:
Darling, thy hot kiss lingers on my lips.
Before he wrote that poem, he used to feed almost entirely on pork chops. After it was published, he pretended that a little ripe fruit was all he needed. What’s become of him? What do you suppose? Trichinosis, of course. It’s much better to be perfectly honest. The worst case of all was last May. A man made himself believe that he loved Bradelby’s sister, and he never got any better. He just pined away and married her. Perhaps you don’t realise what that means, but you never met Bradelby’s sister.