What would we say if someone threw rubbish into our room through an open window?

This morning, whilst working with Ruth Jochanan Weiniger on our revisions of my first draft translation of Norbert Fabián Čapek’s “To the Sunny Shore: A Guide to Living Joyfully” (K slunnému brehu: Prúvodce do radostného Zivota), we came to the following passage in Chapter 10. His words are so clearly relevant to the way too many people today seem unable to be at all critical about the so-called “news” they are getting from social media, that it seems worth reprinting Čapek’s words here without further comment . . .

If only people would at least accept only thoughts that are valuable, truthful, and noble! But what do we see? They take, for example, a newspaper, read indiscriminately, and fill their minds with rubbish. Someone sits down to breakfast and with every bite of bread swallows a murder. Before finishing their coffee, fifty corpses have passed through their mind. They go out on the street, and someone is shouting: “A big murder, a train collision, eighty injured.” They come to the office or the factory, and someone greets them with the words: “Have you heard about that outrage?”

What would we say if someone threw rubbish into our room through an open window? And yet, isn’t the same thing happening in the realm of thoughts, when someone throws their mental rubbish into our consciousness and subconsciousness, from which bad moods then inevitably arise?

The way some people, instead of engaging in directed thinking, allow themselves to be ruled by undesirable thoughts reminds me of a lady we saw walking with her little doggy. It tugged her here and there, and the lady followed it everywhere. At times, the doggy stood on its hind legs, and the lady pulled and scolded it until it deigned to run to the nearest post. This is unworthy of a person.