Fräulein Schmidt and Mr. AnstrutherVon Arnim, Elizabeth
General
Fräulein Schmidt and Mr. Anstruther
Von Arnim, Elizabeth
British -- Germany -- Fiction; Epistolary fiction; Germany -- Fiction; Love stories; Young women -- Fiction
And why? Only
because she was brought up in the belief that it was proper, and
because, if she omitted to do the proper, female Jena would be aghast.
Well, I think it's a bad thing to be what is known as brought up, don't
you? Why should we poor helpless little children, all soft and
resistless, be squeezed and jammed into the rusty iron bands of parental
points of view? Why should we have to have points of view at all? Why
not, for those few divine years when we are still so near God, leave us
just to guess and wonder? We are not given a chance. On our pulpy little
minds our parents carve their opinions, and the mass slowly hardens, and
all those deep, narrow, up and down strokes harden with it, and the
first thing the best of us have to do on growing up is to waste precious
time rubbing and beating at the things to try to get them out. Surely
the child of the most admirable, wise parent is richer with his own
faulty but original point of view than he would be fitted out with the
choicest selection of maxims and conclusions that he did not have to
think out for himself? I could never be a schoolmistress. I should be
afraid to teach the children. They know more than I do. They know how to
be happy, how to live from day to day in god-like indifference to what
may come next. And is not how to be happy the secret we spend our lives
trying to guess? Why then should I, by forcing them to look through my
stale eyes, show them as through a dreadful magnifying glass the
terrific possibilities, the cruel explosiveness of what they had been
lightly tossing to each other across the daisies and thinking were only
toys?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account