Our Daily Bill: Time

[tealin]

Shortly after returning from the Discovery, Wilson was commissioned to investigate what was killing off all the grouse in Scotland, work which was supposed to be part-time but which ended up having him work harder than he ever had, putting into practise an ethos he'd outlined years earlier:

His sense of the value of time was equivalent to most persons’ sense of the value of money. For money he never had any concern except to do with as little of it as possible, but time was a free and sacred gift to be spent up to the last minute of every day.

"What a huge responsibility we who employ servants in any way incur by doing so ... they are giving us time to ourselves to use as we like, usefully or wastefully, busily or idly. In no sense does our paying them alter the case – it is purely a matter of time, not money.... Each one of them is doing a little of my drudgery and thereby giving me time for other work. They are all fulfilling their side of the bargain; they are at drudgery day after day from morning to night; and the question comes to me whether I am fulfilling my part of the bargain also day after day from morning to night. Cooks, housemaids, bootboys, gardeners, labourers, milkmen, dustmen, postmen, clerks, agents – in hundreds and hundreds – who have given their lives to save time for the few; and one by one we, the few, will be brought face to face with them and asked what we have done with our lives, and the time they gave us, to make the world better. How awful it will be if we find that there are practically none whom we have helped, and all we can do will be to answer for ourselves – so many hours or days or months I spent playing golf, or hockey or billiards; so many years while you were cooking my meals I was eating them, and so on.... Is this the best that I can do with their time? Am I getting good enough out of this book to warrant my getting others to do my drudgery while I read it? Does the writing of this letter, the painting of this picture, the good of this walk or ride or conversation, warrant my using their time for it? If not, I am not fulfilling my side of the bargain, and I shall be responsible to them for the time they have given me."

from Edward Wilson of the Antarctic, pg 70-71