Thurber Tonight: "A Dozen Disciplines" from "Let Your Mind Alone!"

No, Thurber didn't make the book up.

"At forty-two, I have spent a great many hours thinking about all sorts of subjects, and there is not one of them that I want to go back to for a whole solid hour. I can pretty well cover as much of any subject as I want to in fifteen minutes. Sometimes in six."

-- from tonight's installment of Let Your
Mind Alone!, "A Dozen Disciplines"

by Ken

We've been filling in pieces from Thurber's 1936-37 series Let Your Mind Alone!, as gathered -- with a bunch of other pieces that hadn't yet appeared in book form -- in the book Let Your Mind Alone! and Other More or Less Inspirational Pieces. Tonight's piece, "A Dozen Disciplines," doesn't seem to have appeared in The New Yorker at all. At least I can't find any trace of it, and the magazine sequence goes from "III. The Case for the Daydreamer" (our No. 3) to "IV. How to Adjust Yourself to Your Work" (our No. 5), with the other pieces proceeding in sequence up to "IX. Miscellaneous Mentation" (our No. 10).

Anyone who has already been inspired by the inspirational writing of Mrs. Dorothea Brande, known to Thurber as "the Wake-Up-and-Live! woman," will find himself richly rewarded in "A Dozen Disciplines."


FOR THE FURTHER ADVENTURES OF THE
WAKE-UP-AND-LIVE! WOMAN, CLICK HERE

Our previous coverage of the Let Your Mind Alone! series:

1. "Pythagoras and the Ladder"
2. "Destructive Forces in Life"
3. "The Case for the Daydreamer"
6. "Anodynes for Anxieties"

Tomorrow night: No. 5, "How to Adjust Yourself to Your Work"

THURBER TONIGHT (including WOODY ALLEN, ROBERT BENCHLEY, BOB AND RAY, WILL CUPPY, WOLCOTT GIBBS, RING LARDNER, S. J. PERELMAN, JEAN SHEPHERD, and E. B. WHITE TONIGHT): Check out the series to date

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