The Sunday Eight O'Clock/Good Resolutions
THE business man's good resolutions are filed and recorded on the first of January; the college student formulates his at the opening of the semester. His failures and shortcomings are still so vividly before his mind that he has something of the same virtuous feeling as the inebriate has the morning after the night before.
"Never again for me," Bradley said to me when we were talking over his grades, "I'm no bone head, and next semester I shall be up with the dawn and be waiting for the professor at the class room door with my work in hand. No more cutting or back work."
Then followed a recital of his various scholastic woes and misfortunes, all of which had resulted from his only too easy habit of procrastination and late sleeping—of delayed term papers, and postponed collateral reading, of neglected "sources" and forgotten notes. In the future he was to be a changed man.
It is difficult to correct the mistakes of today; it seems easy to avoid the errors of tomorrow. There is no one so kindly disposed toward virtue as the man whose immoralities have just brought him disaster; there is none so temperate as the man who is racked with the pain of last night's orgies; and no one so keen for intellectual achievement as the student who has just flunked.
It is the man who gets his work done today, not the one who swears he is going without fail to do it tomorrow, whose good resolutions count for anything. It is not the future but the present with which we should concern ourselves. There are few things so unsafe to deal with as futures. I have no doubt that Mr. Longfellow had the good resolutions of the college flunker in mind when he dropped so easily and gracefully into verse:
Let the dead past bury its dead;
Act—act in the living present."
As I stopped off at Kandy's to get shined up a little yesterday I caught sight of Bradley through the open door of the billiard room deep in his fourth game of billiards, his outside reading neglected, his good resolutions forgotten. "What's the use anyway?" he was thinking, if his brain was in operation at all; "It's one hundred and fourteen days until examinations."
February