Domestic fiction; Short stories; Suburban life -- Fiction
Yet the momentary eclipse of these things is not the worst. It _is_
momentary; for if you will but plant them in kindly corners and
favorable exposures of the new house, a mould of respectability will
gradually overspread them again, and they will once more account for
their presence by the air of having been a long time in the family; but
there is danger that in the first moments of mortification you will be
tempted to replace them with new and costly articles. Even the best of
the old things are nothing to boast of in the hard, unpitying light
to which they are exposed, and a difficult and indocile spirit of
extravagance is evoked in the least profuse. Because of this fact alone
I should not commend the diversion of moving save to people of very
ample means as well as perfect leisure; there are more reasons than the
misery of flitting why the dweller in the kilderkin should not covet the
hogshead reeking of claret.
But the grosser misery of moving is, as I have hinted, vastly mitigated
by modern science, and what remains of it one may use himself to with
no tremendous effort. I have found that in the dentist's chair,--that
ironically luxurious seat, cushioned in satirical suggestion of
impossible repose,--after a certain initial period of clawing, filing,
scraping, and punching, one's nerves accommodate themselves to the
torment, and one takes almost an objective interest in the operation of
tooth-filling; and in like manner after two or three wagon-loads of your
household stuff have passed down the public street, and all your morbid
associations with them have been desecrated, you begin almost to like
it. Yet I cannot regard this abandon as a perfectly healthy emotion, and
I do not counsel my reader to mount himself upon the wagon and ride to
and fro even once, for afterwards the remembrance of such an excess will
grieve him.
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.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account