Time to Die
FEW people, if any, are aware that the actual hour at which we retire to bed each evening is the time that we shall eventually meet our Maker. Not only has this staggering revelation been omitted from both Manley P. Hall's Secret Teachings of All Ages and the fake leather volumes that comprise the Encyclopaedia Britannica, themselves the result of multiple capitulations to persistent door-to-door salesmen, but even Rudolf Steiner failed to allude to it during the course of his 6,200 lectures (3,700 of which were written down for posterity).
Those of you with the ability to recall your mathematics lessons will no doubt remember that if you take a set of numbers and find the dead centre (excuse the pun) you will end up with a median. Let's consider the numerals 2, 3, 11, 13, 26, 34 and 47. In this case, the median is 13. This can even be applied to just two numbers, such as 4 and 25, which are added together and then divided by 2. In this case the median, or precise centre, is 14.5. The moment at which you say ‘goodnight’ after a nice cup of cocoa works in a rather similar fashion and the figure you derive from a list of recent bedtimes will determine the median. Not simply to establish one's typical bedtime, of course, but the time at which you are going to die.
If this remarkable principle were ever discovered - and thank goodness none of you will even think about taking my claims seriously - the world would descend into utter chaos. Just look at Belgium. Whenever a friend and I would pass through the country at the turn of the century, on our way to pick up tyres from a depot in Germany, everybody seemed to be in bed by 8 o'clock in the evening. The lights were out, the curtains were tightly drawn and there were no signs of life whatsoever. One might conclude, therefore, that everyone in Belgium is destined to die at the same hour. Saying that, perhaps they were already dead and the sickly aroma of fresh manure - which rural Belgium is famous for - was merely the smell of rotting flesh?
Given that I tend to retire just before 10.30pm and read for several hours, I have taken to wearing a motorcycle helmet and wrapping myself in cotton wool. I then stare nervously at the clock from 10.29 onwards. Although those sixty-seconds are undeniably hellish, reaching the designated hour of 10.30 is like being reborn and at the end of it I always breathe a heavy sigh of relief and can then start thinking about my plans for the following day.
Incidentally, whenever anyone gets run over by a bus in their lunch hour, or perhaps tumbles out of a hot-air balloon in the middle of the afternoon, it demonstrates that they usually spend the entire day lounging around in bed. Laziness cannot be concealed indefinitely, you know.