Let Your Mind Alone! And Other More or Less Inspirational Pieces

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Let Your Mind Alone! And Other More or Less Inspirational Pieces

Name: Let Your Mind Alone! And Other More or Less Inspirational Pieces
Author: James Thurber
ISBN: 8596547196426

Автор James Thurber

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DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "Let Your Mind Alone! And Other More or Less Inspirational Pieces" by James Thurber. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.

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ЯзыкEnglish

ИздательDigiCat

Дата выпуска16 авг. 2022 г.

ISBN8596547196426

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James Thurber

James Thurber was born in Columbus, Ohio, in 1894. Famous for his humorous writings and illustrations, he was a staff member of The New Yorker for more than thirty years. He died in 1961.

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Let Your Mind Alone! And Other More or Less Inspirational Pieces - James Thurber

James Thurber

Let Your Mind Alone! And Other More or Less Inspirational Pieces

EAN 8596547196426

DigiCat, 2022

Contact: DigiCat@okpublishing.info

1. Pythagoras and the Ladder

2. Destructive Forces in Life

3. The Case for the Daydreamer

4. A Dozen Disciplines

5. How to Adjust Yourself to Your Work

6. Anodynes for Anxieties

7. The Conscious vs. The Unconscious

8. Sex ex Machina

9. Sample Intelligence Test

10. Miscellaneous Mentation

The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold

And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold,

Where the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee.

1. The Breaking Up of the Winships

2. My Memories of D. H. Lawrence

3. The Case Against Women

4. No Standing Room Only

5. Nine Needles

6. A Couple of Hamburgers

7. The Case of the Laughing Butler

8. Bateman Comes Home

10. Remembrance of Things Past

11. Something About Polk

12. Aisle Seats in the Mind

A message for Captain Bligh,

And a greeting to Franchot Tone.

13. Suli Suli

14. An Outline of Scientists

15. Highball Flags

16. Mrs. Phelps

17. Guns and Game Calls

18. The Hiding Generation

19. Wild Bird Hickok and His Friends

20. Doc Marlowe

21. Food Fun for the Menfolk

22. Goodbye, Mr. O. Charles Meyer!

23. What Are the Leftists Saying?

24. How to Write an Autobiography

25. After the Steppe Cat, What?

26. Women Go On Forever

27. The Wood Duck

28. The Admiral on the Wheel

Part One

Let your mind alone!

1. Pythagoras and the Ladder

Table of Contents

It was in none other than the black, memorable year 1929 that the indefatigable Professor Walter B. Pitkin rose up with the announcement that for the first time in the career of mankind happiness is coming within the reach of millions of people. Happy living, he confidently asserted, could be attained by at least six or seven people out of every ten, but he figured that not more than one person in a thousand was actually attaining it. However, all the external conditions required for happy living were present, he said, just waiting to be used. The only obstacle was a psychological one. Figuring on a basis of 130,000,000 population in this country and reducing the Professor's estimates to round numbers, we find that in 1929 only 130,000 people were happy, but that between 78,000,000 and 91,000,000 could have been happy, leaving only 52,000,000, at the outside, doomed to discontent. The trouble with all the unhappy ones (except the 52,000,000) was that they didn't Know Themselves, they didn't understand the Science of Happiness, they had no Technique of Thinking. Professor Pitkin wrote a book on the subject; he is, in fact, always writing a book on the subject. So are a number of other people. I have devoted myself to a careful study of as many of these books as a man of my unsteady eyesight and wandering attention could be expected to encompass. And I decided to write a series of articles of my own on the subject, examining what the Success Experts have to say and offering some ideas of my own, the basic one of which is, I think, that man will be better off if he quits monkeying with his mind and just lets it alone. In this, the first of the series, I shall abandon Professor Pitkin to his percentages and his high hopes and consider the author of a best-seller published last summer (an alarming number of these books reach the best-seller list). Let us plunge right into Dr. James L. Mursell's Streamline Your Mind and see what he has to contribute to the New Happiness, as Professor Pitkin has called it.

Conducting a Lady to a Table in a Restaurant

In Chapter VI, which is entitled Using What You've Got, Dr. Mursell deals with the problem of how to learn and how to make use of what you have learned. He believes, to begin with, that you should learn things by doing them, not by just reading up on them. In this connection he presents the case of a young man who wanted to find out how to conduct a lady to a table in a restaurant. Although I have been gored by a great many dilemmas in my time, that particular problem doesn't happen to have been one of them. I must have just stumbled onto the way to conduct a lady to a table in a restaurant. I don't remember, as a young man, ever having given the matter much thought, but I know that I frequently worried about whether I would have enough money to pay for the dinner and still tip the waiter. Dr. Mursell does not touch on the difficult problem of how to maintain your poise as you depart from a restaurant table on which you have left no tip. I constantly find these mental authorities avoiding the larger issues in favor of something which seems comparatively trivial. The plight of the Doctor's young man, for instance, is as nothing compared to my own plight one time in a restaurant in Columbus when I looked up to find my cousin Wilmer Thurber standing beside me flecked with buttermilk and making a sound which was something between the bay of a beagle and the cry of a large bird.

I had been having lunch in the outer of two small rooms which comprised a quiet basement restaurant known as the Hole in the Wall, opposite the State House grounds, a place much frequented by elderly clerks and lady librarians, in spite of its raffish name. Wilmer, it came out, was in the other room; neither of us knew the other was there. The Hole in the Wall was perhaps the calmest restaurant I have ever known; the studious people who came there for lunch usually lunched alone; you rarely heard anybody talk. The aged proprietor of the place, because of some defect, spoke always in whispers, and this added to an effect of almost monasterial quiet. It was upon this quiet that there fell suddenly, that day, the most unearthly sound I have ever heard. My back was to the inner room and I was too disconcerted to look around

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Let Your Mind Alone! And Other More or Less Inspirational Pieces

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James Thurber

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Let Your Mind Alone! And Other More or Less Inspirational Pieces - James Thurber

James Thurber

Let Your Mind Alone! And Other More or Less Inspirational Pieces

Table of Contents

1. Pythagoras and the Ladder