A TOPIC FOR AN IDLE HOUR.

Otago Witness, Issue 2811, 26 August 1908, Page 72

A TOPIC FOR AN IDLE HOUR.

As the idle hour is to the busy physical toijer so is the " idle, irresponsible theme to the brain worker. However closely we may resemble that somewhat irritating insect of whom good' Dr Watt wrote — How doth the little busy bee Imp-rove each, shining hour — the idle hour for thews and sinews and the idle theme for discussion and reflection are frankly seductive. The Japanese artist who spends his life in painting birds — birds of the air and birds of the water, birds at rest and birds in motion — might welcome an idle hour in which to draw even the most impossible dragon. The expert "bodice hand," even though she enjoys the selfrespect and the salary of the expert in her" department, probably has her dreams of the style and "flare" of the skirts she might design in an idle hour. The great writer may enjoy his idle hour in painting the most impossible daubs, the wonderful mathematician in being the poorest- golfer on the links : what' does it matter ? It is his idle hour, and in that irresponsible .idle hour brain and body shake off the shackles of labour, the iron hand of concentration, and revel in irresponsibility. Maeterlinck's bee appeals to us more than Dr Watt's bee ; yet each leaves us realising that there are ' ' points ' ' about the drone, as there were about Mark Twain's "Jumping Frog," which have not been done justice to. We — you and I — don't want to be always improving our minds and picking primroses to pieces to find how they are made. Let us, too, pass an idle hour together sometimes. Such sax idle hour as that which many a member of Cosy Corner Club will still recall, when they extracted a great deal of interest, some humour, and much vicarious philanthropy out of the spending of millions of pounds given them by one who never had a million pence. That was a very happy example of the irresponsible topic. Not so splendid in its possibilities, but as far removed from all probability of experience, is the question, — Which Sense Could We Best Do Without ?— We are so accustomed to the smooth running of every part of that complex machine which we call "ourselves." that to deliberately fancy the absolute stoppage or failure of any part of it is almost impossible. To ask ourselves in some idle hour such as this which part of all that wondrous and delicate mechanism we could best do without is V/ propoiind a riddle in striving to answer which we are launched on quite <i new sea of realisation. In youth there is a haunting and subtle atti*action about the idea of the bedridden invalid. Ignorance of prosaic detail, impossibility of realising what it is that their fanciful thoughts play around — these are the things which enable the young, full of the joy of motion themselves, to see something ideally beautiful in the life of the bed-ridden invalid. It is no .bed of dull, monotonous suffering, no daily course of physical inconveniences and limitations, no fiery rebellion of the spirit slowly quenched under hope deferred which the young realise in their fancy portrait of the interesting and idolised invalid. Sunshine warms and flowers perfume the spotless, dainty room: silken cushions and dainty • coverings lend their soft colour to the couch which is a shrine : patience, resignation, and a becoming dash of cheerfulness surround as with a spiritual atmosphere the

chronic and hopeless invalid of girlish imagination. Her lovely influence pervades the home : she is the spiritual centre of' all human uplifting within her circle. Of course she is fragile ; her hair, I think, is silvery white; her hands are beautiful, though wasted beneath her lovely rings ; and her eyes, despite suffering and weariness, never lose their brilliance and beauty. Something in this fashion does youth, in happy ignorance, paint the portrait of one who has lost one glorious sense — the power of motion. How different the real is from the ideal may each and everyone be long in finding out. Of the deaf, we draw no illusory pictures. Whatever romance th"ere may be about deafness (and there is much, I am convinced) we are effectually cut off from by the too palpable annoyances and absurdities of reality. The deaf man is the butt of a thousand jokes — good, bad, and indifferent, — the deaf woman of a thousands imitations and limitations. We don't -want to*- talk to her, yet we must because one cannot seem unkind and dare not seem rude. We have nothing wise enough to. whisper into \>hat mutely-turned " good, ear." The deaf woman has lost all charm ; she cannot listen ! " All at once, as we walk briskly home through the fast-darkening winter afternoon, we try to realise what it would be like—To Be Deaf;— absolutely deaf ; so deaf that people could be sorry for one instead of. angry and impatient. Not born so, so that we never know what we had lost, or suddenly, so that the blow fell all at once ? and we passed from full communion with to absolute isolation from the' kindly give-and-take of speech and thought about us. To really follow this theme of an idle moment and decide which sense we could most cheerfully- dispense with we try to realise the gradual loss of hearing — the- being shut off little by little from commonplace channels of sympathy and communication, frozen by degrees into an' Arctic Circle of — oneself ! " Well, not so bad as that," we assure ourselves; "not nearly so bad as that. There are our books — we should certainly fall back on reading." Then there must be compensations — immense compensations for the musical, since one, .hears so little good music and so much bad. Immense compensations, too, for the sensitive and the nervous, since the long-drawn agony of the midnight serenading cat, the thin tinkle of the telephone calling us to" a draughty passage to converse with our dearest foe, the blatant; of the latest comic song -reeled " from a street graphophone, and the 'infant prodigy practising next door would all fade off the horizon. But never to hear again " I love you " ; never to hear again the skylark's song as he mounts higher, higher,- and lightly shakes those trills of ecstasy to us. lying far below on the warm hillside^ with the scent of the blossoming gorse around us ! Ah, no ! Would any number of books to read and any number of leisured hours wherein to read them compensate for the vital joy of "talking them over," sorting, out our own views and impressions to compare them with those of our comrades, paring down this, enlarging that, arguing, quoting, differing here, agreeing: there. Why, to the average man and woman {not the mere bookworm, mind, selfishly content to minister to his own intellectual growth), how much of the ioy of reading lies in the after-discussion and comparison ? And how may the deaf barter and chaffer in this market? Then to the uneducated, what could compensate them for the warm stream of human sympathy implied in talking on the one side and listening on the other? However much the talker may presume upon his rights, tryinc alike, maybe. our patience and our sympathy as listener, there is always the romiortine: reflection that presently it will be our turn. We shall talk ; she will listen. But if one were too deaf to listen — why, half our market value as companions, friends, acquaintances would vanish into thin air. Who does not know the charm of the woman who graciously and intelligently listens? And as the shade :>f the great cedar is passed and the glow of the firelight gleams through the old-fashioned French windows the sound of a dear voice singine in ih twilight sweeps the arguments of an idle houi away into the coming night, for what would life be without listening? — What Then of Speech?— Ah, what indeed? Stay! What was that thought that suddenly shaped itself unbidden in the sun-bathed solitude of a far valley among the mountains? "There are two things against which we constantly find ourselves in rebellion, from which we are always too ready to fashion for ourselves Deities of Sorrow, the speech of the living and the silence of the dead." Well, if we were silent we should no longer help to fashion "deities of sorrow" for those we love, with hasty, impetuous, or passionate speech, yet neither could we gladden them with words of love, cheer with words of courage, or shrive ourselves with words of penitence. Could we bear to be silent always? One thinks of the monk of Mar Saba wrapt ii> his impenetrable mantle of silence, lost in the living death of that rock-hewn monastery, set like a wild bird's eyrie among the desolate hills. Yet he had no temptation to speech, being surrounded by his fellow trappists. One thinks of the dumb longing in the eyes of a dog — how it goes to the heart ; how the kind, rough tongue in default' of speech, licks one's hand in an abandonment of love and devotion unutterable. Think of the solemn eye 6 whope wistful pleading wrings the heart of the living, long after speech has left the lips of the dying. And as all these thoughts and thought-pictures pass in quick succession we turn away from the mere suggestion of lost speech, as we did from that of lost hearing. What deprivation then shall we elect from that perfect equipment which only claims our retention when it is out of order, our thankful admiration

when it is restored? In one final decision I am sure we shall all be unanimous. — Not the Loss of Sight. — "Anything but that," I fancy I hear each one declare. For in eyes and Eyesight and all that is included in the possession of this marvellous sense/ surely lies the most precious of all our senses, the pearl of greatest price. And yet a great scientist has said that as an invention and an instrument the huinaa eye would discredit the merest tyro! And what marvellous revelations "science makes to us concerning the connection between eyes and brain ! As strange to- the placid middle-aged man as the elusive tricks 1 these, same eyes played him in his youth. ~~ when love was blind, or earlier sfcill, when ' all the world was rose-coloured* • -