The rule is that you have got to earn exuberance for two. “Learn to eat balanced rations right,” thunders the Auto-comrade, laying down the law; “exercise, perspire, breathe, bathe, sleep out of doors, and sleep enough, rule your liver with a rod of iron, don’t take drugs or nervines, cure sickness beforehand, do an adult’s work in the world, have at least as much fun as you ought to have.”
“That,” he goes on, “is the way to develop enough physical exuberance so that you will be enabled to overcome your present sad addiction to mob intoxication. And, provided your mind is not in as bad condition as your body, this physical over-plus will transmute some of itself into a spiritual exuberance. This will enable you to have more fun with your mind than an enthusiastic kitten has with its tail. It will enable you to look before and after, and purr over what is, as well as to discern, with pleasurable longing, what is not, and set forth confidently to capture it.”
But if, by any chance, you have allowed your mind to get into the sort of condition which the old-fashioned German scholar used to allow his body to get into, it develops that the Auto-comrade hates a flabby brain almost as much as he hates a flabby body. He soon makes it clear that he will not have much to do with any one who has not yet mastered the vigorous and highly complex art of not worrying. Also, he demands of his companion the knack of calm, consecutive thought. This is one reason why so many more Auto-comrades are to be found in crow’s-nests, Gipsy-vans, and shirt-waist factories than on upper Fifth Avenue. For, watching the stars and the sea from a swaying masthead, taking light-heartedly to the open road, or even operating a rather unwholesome sewing-machine all day in silence, is better for consecutiveness of mind than a never-ending round of offices, clubs, servants, committee meetings, teas, dinners, and receptions, to each of which one is a little late.
No matter what the ignorant or the envious may say, there is nothing really unsocial in a moderate indulgence in the art of auto-comradeship. A few weeks of it bring you back a fresher, keener appreciator of your other friends and of humanity in general than you were before setting forth. In the continuous performance of the psalm of life such contrasts as this of solos and choruses have a reciprocal advantage.
But auto-comradeship must not be overdone, as it was overdone by the medieval monks. Its delights are too delicious, its particular vintage of the wine of experience too rich, for long-continued consumption. Consecutive thought, though it is one of man’s greatest pleasures, is at the same time almost the most arduous labor that he can perform. And after a long spell of it, both the Auto-comrade and his companion become exhausted and, perforce, less comradely.
Besides the incidental exhaustion, there is another reason why this beatific association must have its time-limit; for, unfortunately, one’s Auto-comrade is always of the same sex as oneself, and in youth, at least, if the presence of the complementary part of creation is long denied, there comes a time when this denial surges higher and higher in subconsciousness, then breaks into consciousness, and keeps on surging until it deluges all the tranquillities, zests, surprises, and excitements of auto-comradeship, and makes them of no effect.
This is, perhaps, a wise provision for the salvation of the human digestion. For, otherwise, many a man, having tasted of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of auto-comradeship, might thereupon be tempted to retire to his hermit’s den hard by and endeavor to sustain himself for life on apple-sauce.
Most of us, however, long before such extremes have been reached, are sure to rush back to our kind for the simple reason that we are enjoying auto-comradeship so much that we want some one else to enjoy it with.