The Three-Quarter-Hour Society

I HAVE been invited to join another society. The invitation proceeds from a lady who lives in one of the loveliest villages in New Hampshire; nay, that is not the way to put it — from a lady who lives in a New Hampshire village which is one of the loveliest in the world, but which is certainly not the sort of place from which I should expect to get invitations to join societies. Not worldwide societies, at all events, and this is a world-wide society.

Its name is the Three-Quarter-IIour Society. Its sole purpose is to pledge its members to devote three quarters of an hour to solitude and meditation at some time in the course of every waking day. The New Hampshire lady reminds me that meditation and solitude are becoming increasingly difficult to practise. She is right; I had noticed it. She says that the world is too much with us. She has good authority for it (older than Wordsworth’s, for that matter). She says that it is difficult to get away from people, and almost impossible to get away from radios and gramophones. I have myself lectured on this difficulty, to audiences which would have been larger if more people could have got away from their radios and gramophones.

But she has a practical suggestion — which I had not. I had always supposed that the trouble lay in the fact that modern people did not want meditation and solitude, or did not want them enough to go to the trouble of getting them. If one wants solitude and meditation, I said, why not isolate one’s self and meditate? There is no law against it. No state charges a license fee for solitude, and the police have no instructions to suppress meditation, except perhaps at busy traffic intersections. But the New Hampshire lady has put her finger on the real trouble. The world, she says, is full of people who want to go apart and meditate, but who will never have the courage or enterprise to do so until they can do it as members of a society, with the sustaining consciousness that thousands and thousands of other people are going apart and meditating in exactly the same way. They must be assured that what they are doing is not odd, not peculiar, not even individual. The meditation that they practise must be mass meditation; when they resort to solitude they must not resort alone.

And how true this is! Look at the difference it makes. Here am I, a lone and unorganized meditator. I say to my wife, to my guests, to the hostess of the house where I am staying, to whomever it may concern: ‘I am now going upstairs to do my daily meditation.’ What effect does this announcement produce on their unaccustomed minds? They at once conclude that I am a peculiar person. They begin to regard me with distrust, even with active dislike. A man who meditates may do other odd and awkward things. He may refuse to play bridge, or golf. He may want to go for walks, or to talk to the servants about their souls, or to do any of a thousand other things that are not done, and that interfere with the established order of social life.

But let me say, ‘I am now required by the Three-Quarter-Hour Society, of which I am a member, to withdraw and do my daily meditation,’ and how different will be the effect! My wife, my guests, my hostess, will look upon me with approval and admiration, as one who has been admitted to a great and obviously noble-minded brotherhood of which they themselves are not yet members. They will ask me how they can join. It will be apparent to them that meditation, since it is the practice of a whole society, must be highly beneficial instead of completely idiotic. I shall be pointed out with the finger, not of scorn, but of tribute. Not, ‘There goes that poor fool, meditating again!’ but, ‘There goes S., the member of the Meditation Society! Do you know, there are thousands of them, and they all meditate three quarters of an hour every day. Is n’t it wonderful?’

For whereas peculiarity in an individual is reprehensible, peculiarity in an association of many individuals is highly to be commended. The man must not be distinctive, the organization must. The private vice is the collective virtue. In North America it would be thought peculiar for an individual to wear a fez; but what one man may not do without obloquy a hundred thousand men may do with universal applause. I can remember when it was considered queer, outside of Scotland, for grown men to knock little white balls around the pasture lot with long sticks; but as soon as it was perceived that it was not individual men but large associations known as Golf Clubs that were doing it, the taint was instantly dissipated. It was once considered peculiar to exhibit an interest in the serious drama or symphonic music; but this objection has been completely overcome by the simple device of forming societies to listen to serious plays and symphonic concerts.

I am not going to join the Three-QuarterHour Society. My reason, however, is not that I do not approve of it, but that I approve of it too much. Its idea is so good that I want to carry it much further. I am going to found a Twenty-Four-Hour Society of my own. The New Hampshire lady’s society leaves twenty-three and a quarter hours of each day unprotected from the insistent contacts of an inescapable world. Most of these contacts are forced upon us by the appalling number of societies to which we all of us inevitably belong. The TwentyFour-Hour Society will not demand that its members spend the whole time from sunrise to sunrise in meditation; that would be excessive. But it will pledge them not to allow any of that precious time to be intruded on by the claims of any other incorporated organization. They will then have plenty of time for meditation and every other useful form of human activity.

To enter my Society the applicant must renounce and abjure all membership in all other societies of an artificial character. To remain in it he must allow no new memberships to be thrust upon him. This is a tremendously difficult undertaking. It is so difficult that scarcely a man or woman in America in these degenerate times would be capable of carrying it through alone. That is why we must have a society for it; why we must band ourselves together for the purpose of standing alone.

We shall be hated, we shall be abused, we shall be martyrized. The community expects us to join societies. The state practically compels us to. I cannot lay bricks without joining a society of bricklayers. I may plumb the depths of misery alone, but I cannot plumb anything else wuthout joining a society of plumbers. I cannot be a parson without joining a church or a bootlegger without joining a gang. The individual who abjures all society memberships will starve to death, if he does not perish more rapidly at the hands of an infuriated mob. But a society which abjures all other societies may manage to get by.

If it does get by, it will be able to offer its members many advantages. Unlike all other societies, it will be a money saver. He who joins it will never have to pay annual fees to any other society. He will never have to attend any annual meetings but one. He will never have to eat any annual banquets except with me. If he wants titles and offices, my society will provide him with them. I see no reason why we should not incorporate every office, title, and dignity of every other society in the world, by the simple process of adding the prefix ‘anti.’ I am willing to be the Anti-President. The Society can have an Anti-Kleagle, an Anti-Potentate, a Lord High Anti-Doorkeeper, an Anti-Diluvian, and a Most Antique and Antiseptic Antimacassar of the Sacred Sofa. These officers will have no duties, for the Society will have no function save that of preserving its members from membership in anything else; but in that they will not greatly differ from their prototypes.

As prospective Anti-President of this society, I cannot join the society of the New Hampshire lady, and I have written to tell her so. But I can assure her that I and my fellow members will have no need of her society to enable us to snatch forty-five minutes a day from the entanglements of life. Our whole existence will be one grand sweet forty-five minutes.

B. K. SANDWELL