'A Beautiful and Consoling Thought'

The only speeding ticket I have ever received was issued by a police officer in Bellevue, Wa., about fifteen years ago. He clocked me doing thirty-five on a street with a posted speed limit of twenty-five mph. It’s almost embarrassing, so pitiful an infraction. I was careless, not in a hurry. I’m virtually religious about obeying the speed limit. As a reporter, I once rode in a police cruiser in Indiana with a sheriff’s deputy who was chasing a hit-and-run driver. I peered over her shoulder and the speedometer seemed to read about 130 mph. She later confirmed her top speed was 133 mph. She caught the guy and I nearly soiled myself. Any residual fantasy about imitating James Dean had vanished. 

On April 19, 1936, Max Beerbohm broadcast a BBC radio talk titled “Speed.” He begins with an anecdote about the poet W.E. Henley (1849-1903), who was diagnosed with tubercular arthritis at age twelve and his left leg was amputated below the knee. Last year at my fifty-fifth high school reunion, I spoke with my eighth-grade English teacher and thanked her for having us memorize “Invictus.” Together we recited “I am the master of my fate, / I am the captain of my soul.”

 

Beerbohm recounts the one-legged Henley’s love of riding in a fast car: “At last Henley went swinging over hill and dale. The Mercédes was for him a glorious revelation, an apocalypse. His Muse vibrantly responded . . .”

 

Beerbohm sees speed infecting every aspect of life, even dining: “They certainly eat much faster; insomuch that if I am invited to meet some of them at luncheon or dinner I find at each course that I have only just begun when they have all finished; and when I reach my home I ask, ‘Are there any biscuits?’” And he goofs on mock-outrage, always an amusing spectacle:

 

“We are constantly told by the Press that we must be ‘traffic-conscious’. But there is really no need to tell us we must be so. How could we be otherwise? How not be concussion-apprehensive, annihilation-evasive, and similar compound words? When the children of this generation, brought up in fear, shall have become adult, what sort of nervous ailments will their progeny have, one wonders? Many of the present children won't grow up at all. Very old people and very young people form the majority of those who are annually slaughtered upon our roads.”

 

My old speeding ticket, though deserved, now seems absurd. Beerbohm consoles me by noting the Earth rotates at a rate of between 1,037 and 1,670 mph. The essayist puts it at 1,110 mph, and concludes:

 

“This, ladies and gentlemen, is indeed a beautiful and a consoling thought—a thought for you to sleep on, to dream of. Sleep well. Dream beautifully. In fact—Good Night.”

 

[“Speed” is collected in Mainly on the Air (Heinemann, 1946; rev. 1957).]