Several months ago, finding myself in possession of one hundred and seventeen chairs divided about evenly between a city house and a country house, and desiring to simplify my life, I sold half of my worldly goods, evacuated the city house, gave up my employment, and came to live in New England. The difficulty of getting rid of even one half of one’s possessions is considerable, even at removal prices. And after the standard items are disposed of—china, rugs, furniture, books—the surface is merely scratched: you open a closet door and there in the half-dark sit a catcher’s mitt and an old biology notebook.
I recall a moment of peculiar desperation over a gold mirror that, in spite of all our attempts to shake it off, hung steadfastly on till within an hour or so of our scheduled departure. This mirror, which was a large but fairly unattractive one, rapidly came to be a sort of symbol of what I was trying to escape from, and its tenacity frightened me. I was quite prepared simply to abandon it (I knew a man once who, tiring of an automobile, walked away from it on the street and never saw it again), but my wife wouldn’t consent to abandoning anything. It seems there are rules, even to the sort of catharsis to which we were committed: I could give the mirror away or sell it, but I was not privileged to leave it in the house, which (she said) had to be stripped clean.
So I walked out the door hatless and in my shirtsleeves and went round the corner to a junk shop on Second Avenue—a place which displayed a thoroughly miserable assortment of bruised and castoff miscellany. The proprietor stood in the doorway.
“Do you want …” I began. But at that instant an El train joined us and I had to start again and shout.
“Do you want to buy a gold mirror?”
The man shook his head.
“It’s gold!” I yelled. “A beautiful thing!”
Two kibitzers stopped, to attend the deal, and the El train went off down the block, chuckling.
“Nuh,” said the proprietor coldly. “Nuh.”
“I’m giving it away,” I teased.
“I’m nut taking it,” said the proprietor, who, for all I know, may have been trying to simplify his own life.
A few minutes later, after a quick trip back to the house, I slipped the mirror guiltily in a doorway, a bastard child with not even a note asking the finder to treat it kindly. I took a last look at myself in it, and I thought I looked tired.
Lately I haven’t had time to read the papers, as I have been building a mouseproof closet against a rain of mice. But sometimes, kindling a fire with last week’s Gazette, I glance through the pages and catch up a little with the times. I see that a mother is ready to jump from a plane six miles above the World of Tomorrow, that a sailor has read Anthony Adverse standing up, and that Orson Welles (or was it Booth?) sighs for the waning theater.
The news of television, however, is what I particularly go for when I get a chance at the paper, for I believe television is going to be the test of the modern world, and that in this new opportunity to see beyond the range of our vision we shall discover either a new and unbearable disturbance of the general peace or a saving radiance in the sky. We shall stand or fall by television—of that I am quite sure.
It must have been two years ago that I attended a television demonstration at which it was shown beyond reasonable doubt that a person sitting in one room could observe the nonsense taking place in another. I recall being more amused by what was happening in the tangible room where I sat than by what appeared in the peephole of science. The images were plain enough, however, and by paying attention I could see the whites of a pretty woman’s eyes. Since then I have followed the television news closely.
Clearly the race today is between loud speaking and soft, between the things that are and the things that seem to be, between the chemist of RCA and the angel of God. Radio has already given sound a wide currency, and sound “effects” are taking the place once enjoyed by sound itself. Television will enormously enlarge the eye’s range, and, like radio, will advertise the Elsewhere. Together with the tabs, the mags, and the movies, it will insist that we forget the primary and the near in favor of the secondary and the remote. More hours in every twenty-four will be spent digesting ideas, sounds, images—distant and concocted. In sufficient accumulation, radio sounds and television sights may become more familiar to us than their originals. A door closing, heard over the air; a face contorted, seen in a panel of light—these will emerge as the real and the true; and when we bang the door of our own cell or look into another’s face the impression will be of mere artifice. I like to dwell on this quaint time, when the solid world becomes make-believe, McCarthy corporeal and Bergen stuffed, when all is reversed and we shall be like the insane, to whom the antics of the sane seem the crazy twistings of a grig.
When I was a child people simply looked about them and were moderately happy; today they peer beyond the seven seas, bury themselves waist deep in tidings, and by and large what they see and hear makes them unutterably sad.
One odd fact I seem to have picked up in my research is that the performers in telecasting studios will be required to wear a small electric buzzer, or shocker, round their ankle, from which they will get their cues. The director will buzz when it is time for a line, and Actor Smoothjowl will wince slightly at the little pain and appear suddenly to all the people of Melbourne.
This life I lead, setting pictures straight, squaring rugs up with the room—it suggests an ultimate symmetry toward which I strive and strain. Yet I doubt that I am any nearer my goal than I was last year, or ten years ago, even granted that this untidy world is ready for any such orderliness. Going rapidly through the hall, on an errand of doubtful import to God and country, I pause suddenly, like an ant in its tracks, and with the toe of my sneaker shift the corner of the little rug two inches in a southerly direction, so that the edge runs parallel with the floor seams. Healed by this simple geometry, I continue my journey. The act, I can only conclude, satisfies something fundamental in me, and if, fifteen minutes later on my way back, I find that the rug is again out of line, I repeat the performance with no surprise and no temper. Long ago I accepted the fact of a rug’s delinquency; it has been a pitched battle and the end is not in sight. At least one of my ancestors died lunging out of bed at the enemy, and it is more than likely that I shall fall at last, truing up a mediocre mat.
Intellectually, I am ready to admit that there is no special virtue in an accurate alignment of inanimate objects, that a picture hanging cock-eyed on the wall and a rug askew are conceivably as effective as they would be straight; but in practice I can’t go it. If it is my nature to adjust the stance of a watercolor rather than to enjoy its substance, then that’s the whole of it, and I’m lucky to get even the dubious enjoyment that I occasionally experience from coming upon it and finding it square.
The other day something or other started me thinking about these rugs and pictures (ordinarily I carry on the war absent-mindedly), and by reconstructing a twelve-hour period, I figured out that I had straightened a certain rug four times, another twice, a picture once—a total of seven adjustments. I believe this to be par for my private course. Seven times three hundred and sixty-five is two thousand five hundred and fifty-five, which I think I can give as a fair estimate of my yearly penance.
I got a letter from a lightning rod company this morning trying to put the fear of God in me, but with small success. Lightning seems to have lost its menace. Compared to what is going on on earth today, heaven’s firebrands are penny fireworks with wet fuses.