It Might Vex A Man If His Neighbour
Possessed A Telephone And He None; How Would It Be, If Neither Of Them
Had It?
We can hardly realise, now, the blissful quietude of the
pre-telephone epoch.
And the telegraph and the press! They have huddled
mankind together into undignified and unhygienic proximity; we seem to
be breathing each other's air. We know what everybody is doing, in every
corner of the earth; we are told what to think, and to say, and to do.
Your paterfamilias, in pre-telegraph days, used to hammer out a few
solid opinions of his own on matters political and otherwise. He no
longer employs his brain for that purpose. He need only open his morning
paper and in it pours - the oracle of the press, that manufactory of
synthetic fustian, whose main object consists in accustoming humanity to
attach importance to the wrong things. It furnishes him with opinions
ready made, overnight, by some Fleet Street hack at so much a column,
after a little talk with his fellows over a pint of bad beer at the
Press Club. He has been told what to say - yesterday, for instance, it
was some lurid balderdash about a steam-roller and how the Kaiser is to
be fed on dog biscuits at Saint Helena - he has been "doped" by the
editor, who gets the tip - and out he goes! unless he take it - from the
owner, who is waiting for a certain emolument from this or that caucus,
and trims his convictions to their taste. That is what the Press can do.
It vitiates our mundane values. It enables a gang to fool the country.
It cretinises the public mind. The time may come when no respectable
person will be seen touching a daily, save on the sly. Newspaper reading
will become a secret vice. As such, I fear, its popularity is not likely
to wane. Having generated, by means of sundry trite reflections of this
nature, an enviable appetite for breakfast, I dress and step out of
doors to where, at a pleasant table, I can imbibe some coffee and make
my plans for loafing through the day.
Hot, these morning hours. Shadeless the streets. The Greeks, the Romans,
the Orientals knew better than to build wide roadways in a land of
sunshine.
There exists an old book or pamphlet entitled "Napoli senza
sole" - Naples without sun. It gives instructions, they say (for I have
never seen it) how foot passengers may keep for ever in the shade at all
hours of the day; how they may reach any point of the town from another
without being forced to cross the squares, those dazzling patches of
sunlight. The feat could have been accomplished formerly even in Rome,
which was always less umbrageous than Naples. It is out of the question
nowadays. You must do as the Romans do - walk slowly and use the tram
whenever possible.
That is what I purpose to do. There is a line which will take me direct
to the Milvian bridge, where I mean to have a bathe, and then a lunch at
the restaurant across the water.
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