Anthem

We have two key inspirations behind this edition. First, Arnold Bennett’s ‘How to live on 24 hours a day’. This is a short essay but weighty in depth and impact. The essential point being - all individuals on earth are allotted the same time - 24 hours a day. Time is the great leveller, each given their own daily quotient. Bennett posits the question, do you live the most in the time you are given? How often do you strive to be your fullest self, do you seek new knowledge, do you extract as much value from each minute that passes?

Bennett was writing in response to what he felt was the increasing mechanisation of the human self - the white collar job, the officer worker, clocking in for a day’s work and the hours either side pilfered under the guise of fatigue or casual, surface level existence.

How you perform everyday is not a matter of the minutes you allow to pass, but how much life you put into those minutes. Life has many tasks, there are the onerous ones, there are the obligations and necessary moments of humdrum. But after all this, there is a handful of change, that’s called your own time. How you perform as an individual amounts to many elements - it’s the summation of time spent on your mind, body and spirit. In very real terms.

And for the second inspiration? ‘Anthem’ by Ayn Rand. Another short work, but powerful in its rejection of collectivism, which Rand perceived as inhibitive to the individual spirit. Our take is that each person should have their own personal anthem of how they live. Do you step up to life, or do you get into the passenger seat and simply sit along for the ride?