My Life

My Life - Oswald Mosleychoice between purpose and the normal way of life which could have given me notonly security but much happiness.It might have been different in another age. There are periods in history when changeis necessary, and other periods when it is better to keep everything for the time as it is.The art of life is to be in the rhythm of your age. This is clearly a great age whendecisions can vitally effect the whole future of mankind, perhaps in this sense thegreatest age the world has known. It is, therefore, a privilege to be alive at such amoment, but scarcely a happiness to those who are fully conscious of the potential ofmodern science and of the consequent politics. The necessity for effort is inherent inthe age's sense of destiny. It had been evoked for me strongly by the experience of thewar, and by the duty to make what recompense was possible.I do not know whether in another epoch I would just have sustained the sereneequilibrium of a tranquil world, and the enjoyment of private happiness, for I alwaysfeel urging me to effort the practical sense of the engineer who finds it difficult toleave by the wayside broken machines which he knows he is competent to mend, andin human affairs there are always plenty of defective machines inviting attention.Perhaps I was a little like the young Pontifex in Samuel Butler's The Way of All Flesh,who never said the times are out of joint, oh cursed spite, for he always knew that hewas just the lad to put them right. But in other periods these things can be donequietly; the trouble in this age is that the job is too big to be done quietly. Men have tobe persuaded of the necessity for action, and that is a noisy business.My training for the part I had to play in life was partly conscious and partly fortuitous.Consciously it began as soon as I was out of the war and into hospital. My readingwas omniverous and voracious directly I was capable of anything. I wondered if I hadmissed much by not going to university, and interrogated my Oxford and Cambridgecontemporaries in order to discover if they knew much that I did not. The results werereasonably satisfactory, for though like all autodidacts I found gaps in my knowledge,I learned things the universities would not have taught me.Otherwise my time until the end of the war was occupied by a plunge into social life,which began on crutches in London and was pursued with zest through the ampleopportunities then provided; followed by a return in happy circumstances to theCurragh, a period as instructor to wounded officers at Eastbourne which gave memore opportunity for reading, relieved again by some London life, and finallyadministrative experience in the Ministry of Munitions and then in the Foreign Office.All contributed to my political education, not least the social life, whose value insome stages of experience should by no means be dismissed or even underrated. It canbe a fatal malady to elderly statesmen who enjoy it for the first time in later life, justas measles is more dangerous to the old than the young; infantile diseases should beexperienced early. Regarded with plain sense, social life can have a recurrent valuethroughout life to those who understand its uses.Society of this kind is an 'exchange and mart'. People can meet quietly and withoutcommitment to exchange ideas about everything from politics to business. Somepeople use it to exchange other things; the mart element only enters in case of the oldand inadequate, and is usually confined to the outer fringes. For the young it can haveconsiderable value because it enables them to know a diversity of gifted and64 of 424