The Healthy Life Part 20

All of them, perhaps. Present moving life, and long-past history, the mighty movement of nature and the changes of geologic time: sheer beauty too and the gaiety of amus.e.m.e.nts and excursions; do not all have their place in unwinding us from the tight coils we make for our working days?

Freedom to take from the world whatever is there of beauty and of interest--it really hardly matters what or where; freedom enhanced by sympathy, perhaps, for we seem to need some comrade in our play; so many days and nights following each other--no matter exactly how many--for letting ourselves go, and letting the world and all its power and wonder flow into us; that, whatever be place, time and conditions, is the making of a holiday.

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HEALTHY LIFE ABROAD.

"HYGIE."

_A New Definition of Neurasthenia._

We cull the following definition of neurasthenia from our French contemporary: Neurasthenia is discouragement of the soul. Being in a state of discouragement the soul ceases to take care of the body and allows it to become enc.u.mbered with waste products. The body in its turn becomes so defective that the soul is incapable of repairing the enfeebled organs and throws the body away into the water or leaves it somewhere to be crushed or abandons it by some other means.

Neurasthenia may be compared to an indolent mechanic. He neglects to oil his engine. It runs off the rails and is smashed.

_Fresh Departures._

The Vegetarian Society of France has introduced three new sections into its organisation. The first is doc.u.mentary, and aims at the collection, centralisation and cla.s.sification of all information bearing on food reform. The second deals with domestic economy and hygiene. A number of ladies willing to devote themselves to the popularisation of the leading ideas of vegetarianism have joined this section. They offer advice and instruction to all who wish to familiarise themselves with food reform principles. The third section is concerned with physical training and outdoor games, with special reference to the relations.h.i.+p between these things and a non-flesh regimen.

"VEGETARISCHE WARTE."

_Nietzsche as Fruitarian._

"A simple life," wrote Nietzsche in 1879, "is very difficult at the present time," and went on to explain its difficulties and to suggest that even the most determined would be obliged to leave the discovery of the way to a wiser generation. He himself, however, took some steps upon the way during his stay in Genoa, when he lived on bread and fruit and spent but a few s.h.i.+llings a week. Eggs were occasionally included, and artichokes--and the little cookery he needed was done by himself over a spirit lamp. His winter in Genoa, he declares, was the happiest in his life and saw the production of his "Twilight of the G.o.ds."

_Food Reform in Russia._

The movement goes ahead rapidly in Russia. Hardly a town of any size but has now its vegetarian restaurant. This year the first Russian Vegetarian Congress has been held. It seems to have been a very successful gathering. "Seldom," writes one who was present, "have I experienced such a strong impression as was made upon me by this first vegetarian congress in Moscow." Unity seems to have been the prevailing note. Papers were read on the general significance and the various aspects of vegetarianism, followed by discussions. Amongst the various excursions undertaken was a pilgrimage to Yasnaya Polyana, including a visit to Tolstoy's grave.

A Vegetarian Exhibition has also been held in Moscow. It included a fine show of fruits and vegetables, exhibits of various subst.i.tutes for leather, soaps made of vegetable oils, an abundance of Russian and foreign vegetarian literature of all sorts, from the n.o.blest reaches of theory to the most invaluable details of practice. The next Congress is arranged for Easter 1914, at Kiev.

_A Hopeful Sign._

Fifteen years ago the Berlin munic.i.p.al authorities stoutly refused Professor Baron's offer to found an orphanage which should be conducted on vegetarian principles. At the present moment it is being arranged that all school children shall be taught the value of vegetables and leguminous preparations and the wholesomeness of a diet that is relatively non-stimulating and practically meatless.

D.M. RICHARDSON.

THE CURTAINED DOORWAYS.

In George Macdonald's _Phantastes: a Faery Romance for Men and Women_ it is told how a man found himself in the midst of a great circular hall built entirely of black marble. On every side and at regular intervals there were archways, all heavily curtained. Hearing a faint sound of music proceeding from one of these hidden doorways he went towards it and, drawing aside the hangings, found a large room crowded with statuary, but no sign of an living creature. Yet he was certain the music had proceeded from that particular archway. Greatly puzzled, he let the curtain fall and stepped back a few paces. At once the music continued. Stepping stealthily and quickly to the curtain, he again lifted it, and received a vivid impression of a crowd of dancing forms suddenly arrested: something told him beyond dispute that at the moment he had drawn the hangings aside what were now lovely but motionless statues had sprung each to its pedestal out of the mazes of an intricate dance. Sound and movement had been frozen, in a flash of time, into a crowd of beautiful forms--in stone. No statue but seemed to tremble into immobility as the intruder's gaze turned this way and that no marble face but seemed to be aglow with the music that had died with his entry; no white limb but seemed to be tremulous with the rhythm of the dance that had ceased so suddenly.

If the subtlety and imaginative truth of this story should lead you to read the whole book, I shall have had the privilege of introducing you to what is surely one of the finest and most delicately wrought fantasies in the English language, a fantasy so permeated with beauty and truth that you will neither wish nor need to look for the "moral".

But whether you read _Phantastes_ or not, I may be allowed to suggest that the incident I have attempted to describe conveys one of the secrets of healthy living.

It is a trite saying, that health is harmony. But I plead for a much wider and fuller interpretation of harmony than is customary. _Mens sana in corpore sano_--a sane mind in a healthy body--does not fill all the requirements of a healthy life. It is but an excellent theme, wanting orchestration.

It is good to aim at a harmonious working of one's internal arrangements if one has had the misfortune or the folly to break that harmony. The physical basis of life must be attended to if we would be well. Only, you cannot stop there without imperilling the whole scheme.

Again, it is good to train the body by means of exercise, play, singing and handicraft; all these things react both upwards and downwards, outwards and inwards. For example, one of the special virtues of tennis, if it be played at all keenly, is the necessity for making one's feet (those neglected members!) quick and responsive to the messages of eye and brain. In an increasingly sedentary age the rapidly growing popularity of tennis is, for this one reason alone, a good omen. But if you play tennis, or any other healthy outdoor sport, or learn how to sing, or how to breathe, or if you do Muller's exercises daily, for the sole purpose of benefiting your liver or developing your muscles, or of "keeping fit," you will miss the real prize.

It is good, also, to train the mind to be logical, critical and balanced: it is good to cultivate a retentive memory and to store up useful facts. But if while you are aiming at intellectual fitness and alertness you allow these good things to obscure other and better things, if, in short, you let means become ends, you will never be healthy, because you will miss half the joys of living.

There are many very skilful performers on musical instruments. They have set themselves, or their parents have set them, to gain certain prizes, distinctions or qualifications. No music is now too difficult for them to execute. But that is exactly what they do--they execute it: destroy its head and heart by sheer mechanical perfection. They have mastered the piano, or the organ, or the violin, or their own voice; but music eludes them.

You see why I began with that tale of the curtained doors, the mysterious music, and the quivering statuary. There is an elusive, haunting quality about life and all living things which, if we look for it and listen to it, imparts a glamour, a rhythm, a beauty to everything that is worth doing. The great danger is that in the pressure of work, the hurry of play, the pursuit of health, or the training of the mind we miss the very thing which can give meaning and value to all these things. The severely matter-of-fact people don't go near the curtained doors, and if they did, would discover only a lot of cold, lifeless statues. Whoever heard of statues dancing? Whoever heard of music without instruments? And yet this very sense of a lyrical movement imperfectly seen, and of a temporarily frozen music, is not only the very secret of all art: it is a slender guiding clue to the centre of everything....

And in the house of every man, and of every woman, are the curtained doorways.

EDGAR J. SAXON.

HOW MUCH SHOULD WE EAT?

_This discussion arose out of the article with above t.i.tle, by "M.D.,"

which was published in our July number._--[EDS.]

III

I lift my hat to M.D. and trust that, as I don't know him, the somewhat jarring difference that I have with his views will not be put down to personal feeling. A.A. Voysey has put my first objection quite well from the layman's point of view. He says "there is no agreement between those who have been taught physiology." This is true.

Playfair's full diet is different from Voit's. Voit's is different from At.w.a.ter's. At.w.a.ter's is different from Chittenden's.

The custom of reducing the diets to calories, inasmuch as it introduces a false theory, has had a disastrous effect on progress, and has been a great hindrance to the attainment of knowledge. If the coal in the fireplace _were_ the cause of the heat of the fire (but is it?), there is no a.n.a.logy between the elevation of the heat by hundreds and even thousands of degrees when the fire is lighted, and the elevation of half-a-degree or a degree which occurs when food is taken into the body, especially when we remember that a similar elevation of temperature occurs when work is performed by means of the body without eating or drinking at all.

It is quite evident to every clear seer, or it ought to be, that the force of animal life or zoo-dynamic is the cause of the heat of the body, just as the electric force is the cause of the liberation of heat through the battery, and the chemic force is the cause of the heat of the fire, and that zoo-dynamic and electro-dynamic and chemico-dynamic are forms or species or varieties of the one omnipotent and eternal energy by which all things in this universe consist. The aggregate of all the particular forces makes up the eternal energy which is one. They are all species of the one, but it is convenient and even necessary for our limited intellects to consider them separately, for the indefinite number of the facts and also their intricacy and complexity stagger and overwhelm us unless we do; and indeed they stagger us even when we try to treat them and take them up separately for consideration and examination. But now for the proof of A.A. Voysey's statement.

Ranke found he required 100 grammes proteid; fat 100 grammes; carbo-hydrate 240 grammes to keep him going. These he could have got from 9 oz. of lean meat or 250 grammes, 18 oz. of bread or 500 grammes, 12 oz. or 55 grammes of b.u.t.ter and 1 oz of fat (I do not, of course, suggest that it would have been wise for him to get them so).

Moleschott's demands are: proteid 120 grammes, fat 90 grammes, carbo-hydrate 333 grammes. Voit demands for hard work: proteid 145 grammes, fat 100 grammes, carbo-hydrate 450 grammes. At.w.a.ter demands for hard work the following:--proteid 177 grammes, fat 250 grammes, carbo-hydrate 650 grammes. Horace Fletcher, we are told by Professor Chittenden, took for a time, when everything was accurately measured and weighed: proteid 44.9 grammes, fat 38 grammes, carbo-hydrate 253 grammes. Cornaro lived on 12 oz. of solid food and 14 oz. of red wine a day for a period of something like 60 years, from 38 years of age to about 97, and had vigorous health during the time except when he transgressed his rule. Of course, he was not a hard physical worker--_i.e._ he did not do the work of a navvy. But how, in view of these differences, can M.D. say: "These quant.i.ties were settled by physiologists many years ago, and no good reasons have since been adduced for altering them"? It is amazing to me to read such a statement. It reminds me of a statement by a distinguished physician in London during last year to the effect that we could not give a growing schoolboy too much food--we could not over-feed him. My opinion, on the other hand, after a long experience, during which time my eyes have not been shut, is that the large majority of the diseases of humanity are due to mal-nutrition and that the form of that mal-nutrition is over-feeding--not under-feeding. This opinion should be taken for what it is worth. But to test it we should ask ourselves: What is the reason for the necessity to take food into the body? Is it to give strength and heat to the body? Or is it to restore the waste of the body sustained by the action on it of the force of life or zoo-dynamic which inhabits it? The demands for food will vary and vary much according to the way in which we answer this question. As you allowed me to discuss this question in _Healthy Life_ in July and August of last year I must not take up your s.p.a.ce by discussing it again. But the answer we give determines the amounts of food that we require to take, since, obviously, if the strength and heat of the body depend upon the food, the more food we take the more strength and heat shall we have; while, if the function of food in the adult or grown body is only to restore the waste of the body, the question is how much is the waste. There are various ways in which this question can be answered and I cannot go into them now; but I say, in my opinion, the waste is very much less than is commonly supposed. The body, I take it, is made by zoo-dynamic or the life-force to be a fit habitation for itself. The body must waste when the life-force acts through it, and that waste must be restored by food and sleep, or the body will die; since things (the body) cannot act as the medium of conveying forces (zoo-dynamic or the life-force) without wasting under their action. But so beautifully has the body been made by zoo-dynamic that it wastes very little, much less than is commonly supposed, by the action of zoo-dynamic through it. Not seeing this, we ingest into the body far more than is required to restore its waste, and so we fall ill, for, obviously, if we ingest more than the quant.i.ty necessary for this purpose we choke the body up and render it inefficient for its purpose as an instrument for work.

Now this is precisely what seems to me to happen in life. As we are all under the double delusion that the strength of the body and its heat come from the food, we all with one accord put far too much food into the body, and when we find that we die, all of us, generation after generation, at from 50 to 70 years of age, we make up little proverbs to justify our unphysiological conduct and say that three score years and ten are the measure of the duration of life. M.D. says that "some twenty years ago most people lived fairly close to the old physiological quant.i.ties" (but what are these? for we have seen how they vary), "now they have been cut adrift from these and are floundering out of their depth." May I remind M.D. that people are now living longer than they did twenty years ago. How does he account for that? No doubt some of the increase in the length of life is due to the diminution of the birth rate, but still I suppose M.D. would admit that there is an increase in the duration of life over and above what can be accounted for in this way. If so, how does he account for it?