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Routine
“The Gentler View,” Harper’s Weekly (July 6, 1912) : 26
U Michigan copy/scan (hathtrust) : link
Purdue copy/scan (hathitrust) : link
archive.org : link
 

      to be read in tandem with Samuel Beckett on habit — the “compromise effected between the individual and his environment, or between the individual and his own organic eccentricities... the ballast that chains the dog to his vomit...”
ex Samuel Beckett, Proust (1931)It takes such originality of mind to enjoy a holiday. A mind of spontaneity is required. One has to decide two or three times a day what one would most like to do, and, on top of the decision, always a debilitating process, one must summon courage to do the thing at once. The immediateness forced upon one by a limited amount of time is one drain, the existence of so many things from which to make one’s choice is a culminating one, and the combination is a revelation of why one so enjoys being at home. It is wholly because of one’s routine. People are always returning home with insufficient excuses and inconsistent grumblings. What they really return to is their routine. If they take it away with them their capacity for lengthy absences is almost dangerous. If they leave it at home intact, they worry through a holiday with a sense of internal awryness and skip the final days with shame-faced relief.
      A well-established routine is a thing of such fiber and force that it makes you appear a person of decision, character, and will when you are merely a grateful jellyfish long since abandoned to the swing of your routine. It protects and guards you.A routine is so insidious a thing that it is impossible to say whether you are more attached to it than it is to you, or vice versa. Its rigorous support is so endearing and grateful. It starts you off in the morning with a breezy vim that almost passes for energy of your own. It hurries you through duties and on to leisure hours until your quick steps are half the measuring out of your routine and half an effort to keep your feet as your routine races you along. A well-established routine is a thing of such fiber and force that it makes you appear a person of decision, character, and will when you are merely a grateful jellyfish long since abandoned to the swing of your routine. It protects and guards you. It gives you an air of being a person who must not be disturbed or interrupted. It takes the place of your spine when that member dissolves and goes off into space on some affair of its own. It gets you out of bed when nothing else could and its brisk objectivity disciplines a heavy heart.
      A routine even lends zest to a light heart. If you abandon your routine for a guest or a sunny day, you have not only the guest and the day, but you have paid them a compliment which could never have been paid if you had not had a routine to abandon. Or if your buoyancy is so great that you fling aside your routine from sheer wantonness, how could you have known the full bubble of lawlessness unless you had had a firmly ensconced law to overthrow.
      It never tells the things it might. There are such black secrets between it and you! It knows that, when it has got you through a lot of little things and closed you firmly in a quiet room on the stroke of the proper hour, you then sit and look out of the window and strum your fingers and perhaps even play a game of patience. It does not give you up because of that. A routine stands such scurvy treatment without making a protest and with never an attempt at revenge. You fight with it when you are strong, and, when an escape from it has left you weak and stranded, it comes and finds you and picks you up and starts you going again at whatever speed you can best endure. It never tells the things it might. There are such black secrets between it and you! It knows that, when it has got you through a lot of little things and closed you firmly in a quiet room on the stroke of the proper hour, you then sit and look out of the window and strum your fingers and perhaps even play a game of patience. It does not give you up because of that. It gets you to the same place at the same hour the next morning and gives you another chance at a better mode of behavior. Its hope, patience, and loyalty are beautiful, and sometimes you look at it and know it for a better person than you.

      A certain type of person plays patience because that is the type of person she is. She is not ashamed of playing patience, for her mind, when playing it, is in much the same state as it is at any other time. That is the type of mind she has. There is nothing more to be said about her. Then there is another kind of mind that succumbs to patience as a Kipling hero would to secret drinking. The mind is a strong, self-respecting mind worthy of better things and believed to employ itself with better things. It has no illusions about patience. It knows precisely what a depth of soothing imbecility it attains to when it plays patience. It feels acutely the difference between itself when playing patience and when doing other things. But it does not care. It likes patience. Or rather it loathes patience, but must play it. Its fingers have the most imperious desire to shuffle cards. That seems harmless, and cards are shuffled idly for many minutes without any intention of permitting the thing to go further. Then, before one knows it, the cards are being laid out, perhaps on a window-sill or a mantel, and, with the cards laid out, one might as well see how the thing comes out. All the time during which one is turning over the cards the honest, admonishing part of oneself murmurs silently, “Wasteful, futile, boresome, asinine imbecility”; and adds each time, “I wager I get it out in three this time .”
      One never intends to play more than one game of patience and that takes but a moment or two, so it is hard to call oneself too sharply to account; but then there is the next game and the next and the one after that, and finally one has given up all the other things one meant and intended and was bound to do. One has settled down to a debauch of patience. One’s only hope is that no one is looking; one’s only effort is to avoid meeting an appraising eye. The monotony of turning over cards that are not required, the lethargic pleasure of placing the card one needed, the stultifying contentment of winning the game against fifty-two odds are the only emotions one’s nature desires. Even the fear that one possibly is the kind of person who plays patience does not rouse one. The possibility is accepted in all its likelihood and one plays on.
      but no, it is not so much that one is any particular kind of person as it is that that is the kind of game that patience is. Hours afterward, when one has temporarily and ardently reformed, the recollection comes that Stevenson played patience when he was ill, that a great man once said he played game after game while his dearest friend was being operated on in the next room, and that you once saw a woman play patience dully, endlessly, while she waited to hear whether her husband intended to divorce her. Perhaps, after all, patience — but the idea is discarded. Those people played patience when they were living with such intentness subconsciously that consciously they were hardly existent at all, and it was the tension of their bodily mechanism that kept the cards going. When a happy, well person plays patience — but no, it is not so much that one is any particular kind of person as it is that that is the kind of game that patience is.
 

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