XV. Second and Third Winds

XV

SECONDAND THIRD WINDS

WE have dealt with the humbler tasks. We come now to the tasks that are not so humble. We have considered how we may perform our routine duties. But men of a higher stamp, men with an aim in life, men who want to mean something, are not satisfied with merely performing routine duties. They aspire to something nobler and more soul-stirring. Not content with fulfilling the duties the world lays upon them, they want to lay upon themselves duties to fulfill. Perhaps, with Bernard Shaw, they feel that the true joy in life is

the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap-heap; the being a force of Nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances, complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.

An ideal like that in itself will exalt a man, and give part of the strength needed for its own realization. But it carries with it a great danger. This is the danger that the ideal, instead of finding its outlet in action may evaporate into day-dreams and gorgeous intentions whose date for fulfillment is always set at some vague time in the future. As a preliminary antidote for such a danger, I suggest these lines of Goethe:

Lose this day loitering—‘twill be the same story
Tomorrow—and the next more dilatory.
Then indecision brings its own delays.
And days are lost lamenting over days.
Are you in earnest? Seize this very minute—
What you can do, or dream you can, begin it.
Courage has genius, power and magic in it;
Only engage, and then the mind grows heated—
Begin it and the work will be completed.

What Goethe saw so powerfully, William James saw later, and elaborated the idea in a theory which goes beyond even this. That theory appeared in an essay called “The Energies of Men.” In all English and American literature there is nothing of its short length—a mere thirty-five pages—so calculated to inspire a man with a passion for work. It is published in his Memories and Studies (Longmans, Green), and separately. By all means read it. Read it, if you can, before your next meal. If it does not inspire you with a passion to go out immediately and do something large and glorious, you are probably not normal.

Every sentence and illustration of that essay is so indispensable and full of meaning, that I cannot hope to give you any summary, or the “gist” of it. I can, however, give you a premonition of what it is about, and this itself can best be done, for the most part, in James’s own words:

“Everyone knows what it is,” he says, “to start a piece of work, either intellectual or muscular, feeling stale. And everybody knows what it is to ‘warm up’ to his job. The process of warming up gets particularly striking in the phenomenon known as ‘second wind.’ On usual occasions we make a practice of stopping an occupation as soon as we meet the first effective layer (so to call it) of fatigue. We have then walked, played, or worked ‘enough,’ so we desist. That amount of fatigue is an effacious obstruction on this side of which our usual life is cast. But if an unusual necessity forces us to press onward, a surprising thing occurs. The fatigue gets worse up to a certain critical point, when gradually or suddenly it passes away, and we are fresher than before. We have evidently tapped a level of new energy, masked until then by the fatigue-obstacle usually obeyed. There may be a layer after layer of this experience. A third and fourth ‘wind’ may supervene. Mental activity shows the phenomenon as well as physical, and in exceptional cases we may find beyond the very extremity of fatigue-distress, amounts of ease and power that we never dreamed ourselves to own—sources of strength habitually not taxed at all because habitually we never push through the obstruction never pass those early critical points.”

For many years James mused upon the phenomenon of second wind, trying to find a physiological theory. It is evident, he decided, that our organism has

stored-up reserves of energy that are ordinarily not called upon, but that may be called upon; deeper and deeper strata of combustible or explosible material . . . repairing themselves by rest as well as do the superficial strata.

He compares our energy-budge to our nutritive budget.

Physiologists say that a man is in “nutritive equilibrium” when day after day he neither gains nor loses weight. But the odd thing is that this condition may obtain on astonishingly different amount of food. Take a man in nutritive equilibrium, and systematically increases or lessen his rations. In the first case he will begin to gain weight, in the second case to lose it. The change will be greatest on the first day, less on the second, still less on the third; and so on, till he has gained all that he will gain, or lost all that he will lose on that altered diet. He is now in nutritive equilibrium again, but with a new weight; and this neither lessens nor increases because his various combustion-processes have adjusted themselves to the changed dietary...

Just so one can be in what I might call “efficiency-equilibrium” (neither gaining nor losing power when once the equilibrium is reached) on astonishingly different quantities of work, no matter in what direction the work may be measured. It may be physical work, intellectual work, moral work or spiritual work.

“Of course,” he admits, “there are limits: the trees don’t grow into the sky.... But the very same individual, pushing his energies to their extreme, may in a vast number of cases keep the pace up day after day, and find no ‘reaction’ of a bad sort, so long as decent hygienic conditions are preserved.”

These are astonishing statements; approaching if true, a veritable revelation. But James goes on to illustrate the truth of his statement on a wholesale scale:

Country people and city people, as a class, illustrate this difference. The rapid rate of life, the number of decisions in an hour, the many things to keep account of, in a busy city man’s or woman’s life, seem monstrous to a country brother. He doesn’t see how we live at all. A day in New York or Chicago fills him with terror. The danger and noise make it appear like a permanent earth quake. But settle him there, and in a year or two he will have caught the pulse-beat. He will vibrate to the city’s rhythms; and if he only succeeds in his avocation, whatever that may be, he will find a joy in all the hurry and the tension, he will keep the pace as well as any of us, and get as much out of himself in any week as he ever did in ten weeks in the country . . .

The transformation, moreover, is a chronic one: the new level of energy becomes permanent.

How are we to produce these marvelous results? How are we to draw on our vast unused powers and make them available? How are we to keep ourselves going at the highest efficient speed on all six cylinders, instead of idling along, knocking on one, losing compression on another, and missing on three?

In the instance of the country folk in the city, the stimuli of those who successfully respond and undergo the transformation, are, in James’s words, “the example of others, and crowd-pressure and contagion.” There is also duty. “The duties of new offices of trust are constantly producing this effect on the human beings appointed to them.”

But there are other stimuli than these for bringing out our latent resources. I cannot quote all the inspiring examples which James cites to show the diverse ways in which the resources have been drawn on, but I can summarize the “stimuli” which he credits for them. They include, in addition to those just mentioned; excitements, ideas, efforts, love, anger, religious crises, love-crises, indignation-crises, despair in some cases, the suppression of “fear thought” which is the “self-suggestion of inferiority” (phrases he borrows from Horace Fletcher), systematic ascetism, “beginning with easy tasks, passing to harder ones, and exercising day by day.”

Finally he adds:

The normal opener of deeper and deeper levels of energy is the will. The difficulty is to use it, to make the effort which the word “volition” implies. ... It is notorious that a single successful effort of moral volition, such as saying “no” to some habitual temptation, or performing some courageous act, will launch a man on a higher level of energy for days and weeks, will give him a new range of power. “In the act of uncorking the whisky bottle which I had brought home to get drunk upon.” Said a man to me, “I suddenly found myself running out into the garden, where I smashed it on the ground. I felt so happy and uplifted after this act, that for two months I wasn’t tempted to touch a drop.”

There is one stimulus to breaking down the fatigue-barriers which James, though he occasionally appears to get close to it, does not mention. It is a very important stimulus. In fact, I am quite prepared to call it the most important of them all. It is sometimes derivative; and includes in art one or two of the stimuli already referred to. This stimulus is intensity of interest.

Interest, excitement, absorption in the pursuit of an object, make you forget yourself and your discomforts. A man who is so tired out from the day at the office that he cannot read his newspaper on the subway, who brings home some work and is too tired to understand it after dinner, though he makes several attempts and several fresh starts to “get his mind down to it,” may none the less turn to a detective story, and follow the course of its characters, the clues, the shrewd mental workings of the detective, trying to anticipate his deductions and conclusions, all with the most intense concentration and the highest relish. He may feel too worn out mentally to sit home and read a consular report on a matter of interest to his business, a report containing no long chains of reasoning nor a single subtle statement; yet he will not feel too tired to dress for the theatre and enjoy a Shaw comedy to the full, with one clever and subtle epigram touching off another like a package of firecrackers. A stupid office boy will show intelligence about baseball and professional boxing gossip. The explanation in each case is simply a difference in interest.

This principle in the mental field applies quite as strongly in the physical. A man who would be completely tired out if he beat a rug for his wife, will play five sets of tennis of an afternoon, absorbing ten times as much physical energy. The first is “work,” the second “play.” Every soldier is familiar with the immense difference it makes to him whether he is drilling with or without music; in the first case his step is lighter, his heart is lighter, his rifle is lighter; his fatigue is half gone. Modern gymnasiums are beginning to recognize this effect by giving their callisthenic exercises to music of a piano or a phonograph. But both drilling and calisthenics are considered “work” and the principle is still better illustrated at a dance, where a man is quite unconscious (unless his partner is awkward or unattractive) that he is working. Every man who has ever adventured upon a ballroom floor can tell you how much better he can dance, how much more uncontrollable is his craving to dance, how much longer he can dance, with good music than with bad. A man will go to a social affair, and he will dance and dance; he will be there for every encore; he will clap and clap for more; and when the affair is over and the stains of “Home, Sweet Home” have sent him home in spite of himself, he will fall into a taxicab in a state of utter collapse; and when he is arrived home, will scarcely have the energy to undress for bed. He will finally be in bed at anywhere from half past one to half past three in the morning. But let him stay in the office till after midnight, let him “work” till half past one or half past three in the morning, and till the end of his life he will never have done telling about that prodigy of accomplishment.

The same principle which applies to the common man applies to the genius. It may sometimes even appear to make a common man into a genius. The histories of philosophy and science abound with examples of thinkers apparently apathetic and indolent by nature, but who, once upon the scent of a new and original theory or discovery, have bent themselves to an enormous and astounding amount of thinking and reading and experimenting and fact-collecting. The infinite patience and industry of Darwin once he had hit upon the idea of biological evolution and the struggle for survival, and the change of Herbert Spencer from indolence to ambition, once he had glimpsed evolution as a universal law, applying not only to the body, but to the mind, to nations, to social and economic institutions, to language, to the stars, to morals, to manners, to beliefs and theories, and the marvelous erudition which he acquired in gathering all these facts and weaving them into a gigantic system of twenty volumes of philosophy in spite of the grave handicaps of poor finances and poor health—these are but two examples out of hundreds that might be cited.

The common idea that geniuses as a rule are lazy, with a distinct aversion for work in general is one of the greatest of untruths. The untruth has its origin in the fact that geniuses usually have an aversion toward the particular kind of work which their fathers or the world would set them to. The father would set the son up in some respectable profession, make him a minister, a lawyer, a stockbroker, or have him succeed the father as head of the tin-plate mills; but the genius will have none of it. He is neither docile nor tractable; he will forge his own path. But, if he be a true genius, then once he has struck that path, which natural inclination, nay, which every fiber of his being demands that he follow, his industry and pertinacity will make that of your average respectable business man look like the merest dawdling. If Goethe had been lazy, could he have turned out sixty volumes? Could Defoe have turned out two hundred and ten? Could Shakespeare, greatest of them all, have turned out thirty-seven plays and acted in them? Take any classic writer of fiction, Scott or Dickens or Dumas or Dostoevsky, and recall what an imposing thing is the “complete works” of any one of them when gathered in uniform binding. Could indolent men have wrought these things?

We may consider even the classic examples of literary indolence—Samuel Johnson, let us say. He usually wrote only when spurred on by the need of money, and then only enough to keep himself and his wife from starving. After he was pensioned by the king, he indulged his natural sloth by lying in bed until mid-day and after. Yet he carried on his magazine, the Rambler, twice-a-week for two years single-handed; he produced eight volumes of essays, many volumes of biographies and his immense Dictionary; and to pay for his mother’s funeral wrote Rasselas in eight nights. It is evident that when Johnson once set to a task, his powers of sustained concentration were such as only the rarest mortals can equal.

What we find in literature, we find in every other art. A lazy Michael Angelo could not have built St. Peters, to say nothing of his other works. A lazy Beethoven or Mozart could not have composed the number of works that these men did. Franz Schubert, known for his easy-going Bohemian life, always out of funds, always care free, yet managed to turn out several overtures, eight symphonies, and six hundred songs!

The catalog does not end with literature and the arts. Napoleon was such a gourmand for work that he could frequently spare only four hours a night for sleep, and sometimes went without that. Thomas A. Edison is perhaps the greatest inventor that the world has ever seen. By either inventing or improving the electric light, the phonograph, the telephone, the moving picture, and patenting hundreds of other inventions, he has done more that any single man to make our present-day material civilization what it is. Yet though now in his seventies, he hardly ever takes a holiday, sleeps only four consecutive hours and works at all hours of the day and night. One could go on and on.

And how are these prodigious achievements possible? Geniuses and artists do not doggedly drag themselves through their work. That is not their attitude toward it. They get so much work done because the work they do is their play, their recreation, their passion.

And it is so because of their intensity of interest. “Warming up to one’s work,” as cited by James, and the manner in which “the mind grows heated,” as expressed by Goethe, are simply ways of saying that though you may broach your work without interest and without enthusiasm, you are gradually or suddenly seized by an interest, which up to a certain point continues to mount. With the genius this interest is greater than with the common man. As psychologists have pointed out, a man is not a genius because he concentrates more than the ordinary man; he concentrates more because he is a genius. His ideas overflow; they come with such rapidity, they change the aspects of his subject with such kaleidoscopic variety, they throw so many new and interesting and dazzling lights on it, that his attention is sustained by following them. The dullard, no matter how much of a plugger he may be, finds the utmost difficulty in sticking to any train of thought of his own, because his mind will produce only hackneyed and barren ideas, hardly worth attending to.

The problem, then in all creative work, is to seek to sustain the interest at the highest pitch, never allowing it to flag. As long as the interest is intense enough, physical and mental fatigue will not greatly matter. Eight times out of nine it is flagging interest, rather than real fatigue, which makes us quit. The phenomenon might be represented on a chart by two lines or curves, such as the political economists use for “demand curves” and supply curves.” Starting at the top, and slanting downward (or starting low, mounting higher, and then curving down again), would be a curve or an irregular up and down line representing interest. Starting at the bottom and slanting upward, would be a curve or irregular line representing fatigue. At some point these two lines would meet; and that would be the point at which you would ordinarily quit.

There are two ways to put off this point. If by diversification, by turning from one subject to another, by changing the aspects considered even of a single subject; you can sustain or increase your interest, then the top line representing interest will not go down to meet the line representing fatigue; the fatigue line will have further to go, higher to mount; the point of intersection may be surprisingly postponed.

But if the two lines do meet, you have still a recourse, if you care to use it. That is your will. You can fight through the point by sheer effort, trusting that after a time either the upper interest line will rise again or the lower fatigue line will fall, allowing you another spell of achievement; and so on through other points of intersection. “Heroism,” said W.T. Grenfell, “is endurance for one moment more.”

I shall be told that this is a very dangerous doctrine, that if put into practice it would lead to overwork, overstrain and nervous breakdown. It is possible to overdo it; but I am convinced that for the overwhelming majority of those who read this, there is not the slightest danger of such a thing happening. Most breakdowns attributed to overwork do not come from overwork, but from worry, dissipation and unhygienic living. Indolence will always find excuses for its own existence; and the greatest of these has always been, and will always be, this bogey of “overwork.”