They keep the radio going low at the village garage. You can sit on a bench by the stove and listen while the mechanic tinkers with your car. The car is brought in and the doors are rolled shut behind it to keep out the cold, and everything is sort of cozy and quiet in there, with the music faintly in your ears and the re-treads suspended above your head from the rafters and the inner tubes arranged in boxes on the shelf. The radio singer (a baritone) is singing “Pale Hands I Loved Beside the Shalimar.” Love oozes in a ribbon from the cabinet—genuine, passionate, romantic love, yet quiet and restful because it is turned down low. I don’t know where the Shalimar is. Perhaps Persia. Love, riding the waves of warmth from the stove, takes possession of me. I see a girl of breathtaking loveliness; her hands are Persian and pale: The mechanic, adjusting the points on my distributor, has hands that are not pale. They are almost black and they know what they’re doing. The mechanic has never seen the Shalimar, never seen the inside of a radio studio where love originates, but he knows everything there is to know about a motor. The stove and the music create a moment of total contentment of mind and body as the singer ends with the haunting question: “Where are you now? Where are you now?” In twenty minutes they give me back my car and I pass through the doorway into the crisp world, away from the oasis of love and dreams of fair women—a man with a smooth-running engine, beside the Shalimar.
Some day I mean to have a fireside chat with my government, that we may come to know each other a little better, for it is by a better understanding of the other’s traits that a government and its citizens must fulfill their mutual destinies. In my chat I want particularly to take up the first sentence under Section G of Form 1040, which is called “Items exempt from tax” and which starts this way:
The following items are partially exempt from tax: (a) Amounts received (other than amounts paid by reason of the death of the insured and interest payments on such amounts and other than amounts received as annuities) under a life insurance or endowment contract, but if such amounts (when added to amounts received before the taxable year under such contract) exceed the aggregate premiums or consideration paid (whether or not paid during the taxable year) then the excess shall be included in gross income.…
I want to ask my government what it thinks would become of me and my family if I were to write like that. Three sets of parentheses in one sentence! I’d be on relief inside of a month.
That sentence, above, was obviously written by a lawyer in one of his flights of rhetorical secrecy. There isn’t any thought or idea that can’t be expressed in a fairly simple declarative sentence, or in a series of fairly simple declarative sentences. The contents of Section G of Form 1040, I am perfectly sure, could be stated so that the average person could grasp it without suffering dizzy spells. I could state it plainly myself if I could get some lawyer to disentangle it for me first. I’ll make my government a proposition: for a five-dollar bill (and costs) I will state it plainly.
I was thinking as I prepared to pay my tax how lucky I am about figures. Figures mean little to me, and for that reason use up very little of my time. To some people figures are the most vivid signs there are. Some people can look at the notation 5/23/29 and it means something to them, calls up some sort of image. I can’t do that. I can see lust in a pig’s eye, but I can’t see a day in a number. I remember days, if at all, by the dent they made on me, not by the dent they made on the calendar.
When figures refer to sums of money, it all depends on what scale they’re in whether they register with me or not. To me all sums under a dollar seem vital and important. Sums under a dollar seem to me to have an enormous quantitative variation. I think of fifty cents as the devil of a lot more than a quarter. The sum of ninety cents seems a lot to spend for anything, no matter what. But when I get up into gustier amounts, among sums like fifty dollars, or a hundred and thirty-two dollars, or three hundred and seven dollars, they all sound pretty much alike. If I have the money at all I can spend two hundred and thirty dollars with the same painless ease with which I might spend one hundred and fifteen. They seem virtually the same thing. Probably the importance that I attach to sums less than a dollar is a hangover from the days when practically every transaction in life was for something under a dollar, and was breathtaking.
One reason I bother to set down these remarks is because I think department stores should be informed that, to at least one customer, a dollar seems less money than ninety-eight cents. Stores are frittering away their time when they mark down something in the hope of luring me to buy. Another reason is that I think my government should be told that a vast amount of fuss could be avoided if, in taxing my income, it would explain clearly what is expected of me in the way of a payment and then, if it feared this might not supply enough revenue, simply wind up its instructions for computing the tax with the brisk remark: “Double it.” I could double my tax and not bat an eye. It’s only when I double the time spent translating Form 1040, or when I pay a lawyer to do it for me, that I feel the pinch. I doubt that there is any such complexity in the financial aspects of my life as is implied by the Treasury Department’s searching inquiry. In many ways my life is complex. I keep sheep, and there is nothing simple about being a part-time shepherd. But neither the profit nor the loss from my association with ruminants need bother my country overmuch. There is nothing in it, one way or another, for the United States. I have my own little system for making and spending money. I am honest and I am willing. It shouldn’t require a lawyer to set me at peace with my country.
On the first morning after this latest fall of snow, we went out early, my wife and I, to hunt for a sleigh and a horse. The plow had been along the road and left a perfect surface for sleighing. At the crack of day, in a six-cylinder sedan, we sallied forth to look for all our yesterdays. I knew of several barns where I thought the past might lie.
This quest will long remain in my mind—the great beauty of the morning, with the trees loaded with quiet snow, the special luster of earliness and the purity and expectancy of the new day, the sharp air, and the low cold sun promising the continuance of wintry pleasures, and in our memory the jingle of bells. We went from farm to farm (the ones we knew had horses), rapping on kitchen doors, stirring up the wives who would tell us where the men were. Everywhere the same answer: either there was no sleigh or there was a sleigh but it was buried under six tons of hay or the horse was unshod. But what surprised us was the enthusiasm that our request aroused—the wives standing in the doorway with the cold in-draught of air chilling them, saying they too would like to take a sleighride on a morning like this. Into the faces of some of them a queer look of wistfulness came. It wasn’t just the sleighs that were buried, it was the sense of the past, something of merriment gone, a sound of bells over snow. In the faces of one or two a look of exquisite longing, a memory of love somehow associated with sleighriding.
Nothing ever came of this quest. We got on to the back roads finally, but the day grew older and the morning began to get shoddy the way it does about eleven. A man can go round just so long hollering for the past, then he quits and gets on with the present. We did come across a sleigh on the way back, but the owner had arrived at his destination, taken the horse out, and was paying a call. We didn’t have the crust to intrude.
I have often wondered whether it is just a lot of sentimental rot—this idea that people had more fun in a horse-drawn society. The automobile has won out in fair competition, but it has much to answer for, it seems to me, quite aside from its reputation as a killer. It has taken us apart and put us together again, and changed the backdrop. A generation ago this town had a thriving steamboat service. There was something doing here. There were fish factories and there was a dollar to be made. Today the motor roads to the north of us carry the freight; the steamboat has been laid off, the wharf is in ruins, the factories are gone, and the population has dwindled. High school boys, with a diploma under their arms, must either look to the clam flats for a living or to the world beyond the horizon. High school girls go up to the cities, and learn shorthand—a briefer way to express what might well be said briefer anyway.
Today this town hasn’t even a doctor. It doesn’t have to have a doctor. If you chop off your toe with an ax you get into somebody’s car and he drives you ten miles to the next town where there is a doctor. For movies you drive twenty-five miles. For a railroad junction, fifty. For a mixed drink, twenty-five. For a veterinary, twenty-five. For a football game, fifty, or one hundred, or two hundred, depending on where your allegiance lies. For a bush scythe, ten. For a trotting race or a bingo game, ten. Everything in life is somewhere else, and you get there in a car.
This has certainly done things to our culture. If we are not satisfied with the merchandise that we find in the general store we drive till we find something that does satisfy us. This is tough on the local storekeeper, who has his troubles anyway. Sliced bread arrives in town going sixty miles an hour in a bakery truck that is the gravest menace to every child on the road. Bread, in my town, is the staff of death. Ice cream arrives going fifty, and there is a little nameplate tacked to the door of the cab, giving the driver’s name and explaining that he is pledged to safety and courtesy and has driven 209,587 miles without an accident—(eight times round the world carrying Fro-Joy in an unfrojoyous decade).
Very few housewives bake their own bread. They fry doughnuts a couple of times a week, but there is almost no bread-making. One of our greatest extravagances is homemade bread, which we buy for twenty-five cents a loaf from a lady ten miles away and which often means a special journey to town—twenty miles round trip. It is wonderful bread and worth the effort probably. The whole car smells of it on the way home. But it is a strange way for us to live. I have half a notion to learn to make bread myself: I imagine it’s no harder than mixing a good Martini, and I might come to enjoy the work.
The automobile is at the bottom of every plot. In the next town to ours the grade schools have recently been consolidated. The motor car was responsible. One large school building in the center of town now serves the whole community—which covers many square miles. The children ride to school in busses, some of them a distance of four or five miles. The small one-room schoolhouses are abandoned, and education marches on. The advantages of the consolidated school, I am told, are many. The scholars have a fireproof building and a basketball court with an electric scoreboard. They hang their things in cloakrooms that are ventilated with a flue that has a rotary windwheel carrying the smell of warm clothing up into the sky, instead of out into the classroom. They come in contact with a larger group and come under the influence of more teachers, some of whom are specialists in their subject. There is even a color scheme: the building is yellow and the busses are yellow. I think there can be no doubt that education, in its academic sense, is improved by the centralization of scholars.
Whether the improvement is general nobody knows. Certainly there is something lost. One thing that is lost is the mere business of walking to school, which is something in itself. In my community scholars still get round on the hoof. They pass our house at seven in the morning, clicking along in a ground-eating stride. Some of them make a four-mile trip to school—eight miles in all. And if there is a basketball game that night they will turn right round after supper and do the whole course over again without batting an eyelash. Sometimes a passing motorist gives them a ride, but they never ask for it and never expect it. There is no such thing as hitch-hiking in this town, no thumb is ever raised in entreaty. In all the time I’ve been driving these roads I’ve never been asked for a ride, which is almost unbelievable considering the distances that must be covered, often in zero weather or in storm. Walking is natural for these children, just as motoring is for most others. As for me, although I am motorized to a degree, I enjoy living among pedestrians who have an instinctive and habitual realization that there is more to a journey than the mere fact of arrival. If the consolidated school served by busses destroys that in our children I don’t know that we are ahead of the game after all.