I merely confess the fact. I do not palliate it.
Nor is food all, nor drink, nor work, nor open air. There
has spread abroad along with the so-called physical
efficiency a perfect passion for _information_. Somehow
if a man's stomach is empty and his head clear as a bell,
and if he won't drink and won't smoke, he reaches out
for information. He wants facts. He reads the newspapers
all though, instead of only reading the headings. He
clamours for articles filled with statistics about
illiteracy and alien immigration and the number of
battleships in the Japanese navy.
I know quite a lot of men who have actually bought the
new _Encyclopaedia Britannica_. What is more, they _read_
the thing. They sit in their apartments at night with a
glass of water at their elbow reading the encyclopaedia.
They say that it is literally filled with facts. Other
men spend their time reading the Statistical Abstract of
the United States (they say the figures in it are great)
and the Acts of Congress, and the list of Presidents
since Washington (or was it Washington?).
Spending their evenings thus, and topping it off with a
cold baked apple, and sleeping out in the snow, they go
to work in the morning, so they tell me, with a positive
sense of exhilaration.
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