Thursday, September 4, 2014

The Enjoyment of Living : On Lying in Bed



Philosophy generally seems to be the science of making simple things difficult to understand.

Life after all is made up of eating and sleeping and saying good bye to friends, of reunions and farewell parties, of tears and laughter, of having a haircut once in a two weeks, of watering a potted flower and watching one’s neighbor fall off his roof, and the dressing up of our notions concerning these simple phenomenon of life in a kind of academic jargon but a trick to conceal either an extreme poverty or an extreme vagueness of ideas on the part of the university professors.  Philosophy therefore has become a science by means of which we begin more and more to understand less and less about ourselves.  What the philosophers have succeeded in this; the more they talk about it, the more confused we become.

What is significance of lying in bed physically and spiritually?  Physically it means retreat to oneself, shut up from the outside world, when one assumes the physical posture most conducive to rest and peace and contemplation.  There is a certain proper and luxurious way of lying in the bed.  Never lay straight in the bed like a corps, always curl up on one side. I feel one of the greatest pleasures of life is to curl up one’s leg in bed.  When one is in bed, the muscles are at rest, the circulation becomes smoother and more regular, respiration becomes steadier and all the optical auditory and vaso- motor nerves are more or less completely at rest, bringing about a more or less complete physical quietude and therefore making mental concentration whether on ideas or on sensations, more absolute.

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