Making Life Worth While — Themes and Context

The Rocking Chair as a Structural Motif

Fairbanks returns to the rocking chair at several points, using it as a concrete emblem of inertia. In the first chapter, he contrasts the chair with active verbs: "turning up something on your own account" rather than hoping. Later, he describes a man who "held down a seat in the rocking chair fleet out on the shady piazza" as failing to make the most of life. The chair is not just furniture but a structural device that ties together the book's argument against passivity. Fairbanks even admits there is "a time for everything, even the stealthy, creeping rocking chair—and that’s about bedtime," a qualification that prevents the image from becoming a mere slogan. By repeating the motif across chapters, he creates a visual shorthand for the book's central opposition between motion and stillness.

Anecdotal Evidence and the Insurance Agent Story

The longest sustained narrative in the excerpts is the tale of a life insurance agent who bets a despondent businessman that he can regain his health in a week. The agent diagnoses the man's problem not as physical but as mental: "You didn't go crazy— your..." (the excerpt cuts off). The story is told in the businessman's voice, with Fairbanks framing it as a lesson in the power of directed attention. The agent's method is to prescribe small, daily actions—"little things"—rather than grand reforms. This anecdote exemplifies Fairbanks's reliance on secondhand testimony and dialogue to make his points. He does not claim to have witnessed the event; instead, he presents it as a story heard from a friend, which adds a layer of oral tradition to the book's argument. The agent's confident, good-natured tone mirrors Fairbanks's own authorial voice, suggesting that the cure for despair is a combination of humor and routine.

Movement Between Scenes: From Piazza to Beach to Studio

Fairbanks shifts settings rapidly, often within a single chapter. The opening scene is a shady piazza; then the insurance agent story moves to Long Beach, under an umbrella-tent, with bathers and waves. Later, the list of illustrations hints at a "studio confab" and "alone with the Grand Canyon." This restless movement mirrors the book's philosophy: life is a series of scenes to be entered fully. Fairbanks does not linger in one location; he uses each setting to illustrate a different facet of his argument. The beach scene emphasizes physical vitality and social encounter; the studio suggests creative work; the Grand Canyon implies solitude and awe. By jumping between these backdrops, he creates a sense of momentum that reinforces his message that stagnation is the enemy of a worthwhile life. The reader is never allowed to settle into a single mood or place.

Direct Address and the Reader's Role

Fairbanks frequently breaks the fourth wall, speaking directly to "you" and even commenting on his own writing process. In the insurance agent anecdote, he inserts: "(Courage, friend reader. This isn’t the beginning of the novel I intend to write.)" This aside acknowledges the artifice of the story while also building rapport. He also uses rhetorical questions—"Am I right?"—and commands: "Let there be no mistake about Making Life Worth While." This direct address turns the book into a kind of conversation, with the reader cast as a willing participant in Fairbanks's self-improvement project. The foreword reinforces this by stating that the book has "no particular plan or sequence" and contains "everything in general—and nothing in particular," which paradoxically invites the reader to find their own path through the material. The effect is that of a friendly, if occasionally bossy, mentor.

Fairbanks's method is cumulative rather than linear. Readers will find that the chapters can be taken in any order, each offering a variation on the theme of active engagement. Pay attention to the small details—the grains of sand, the rocking chair, the insurance agent's smile—as they are the building blocks of his argument. The book rewards those who read it as Fairbanks suggests one should live: with curiosity and a willingness to be moved by the next scene.

Reading Fairbanks’s call to shake off the rocking chair, I remembered my grandfather’s porch, still and dusty, and how I once found his old annotated copy of The Secret Doctrine, Vol. 4 of 4 The Synthesis of Science, Religion, and Philosophy — Background and Themes—it offered a different stillness, one that felt like waiting. Both books hummed with the same quiet tension between motion and pause.