Pseudo-mendacity
If my wife and I decided to sell our house, would it be ethical to ask the neighbors who live up the road to clean up some of the clutter decorating their yards? My main neighbor is a farmer, with 800 acres or so devoted to apples and peaches, and another bunch of land devoted to cattle and hay fields. What looks like "clutter" to me (and perhaps would also to potential buyers) is to my neighbor just "collateral damage" of farming. You can't own ten or twenty pieces of farm machinery without some of them needing repair, by which I mean they've broken down and are in various stages of being worked on.
It's not that it's all that bad, mind you, but the old engine that's chained up above the 1965 Massey-Ferguson tractor, and the greasy plots of grass surrounding the work area, are not the sorts of scenery that would appeal to buyers in search of "country living." Granted, the idea of country living held in the minds of most urban yuppies bears little resemblance to the real thing. You can't have cows without cow pats, and you can't have beautiful springtime apple trees without the autumn's itinerant workers and their litter. You can't have reality without reality.
Places where people live are never perfect, and a lot of the shortcomings trace to differences in people's tastes and necessities. I don't think I would ever want to live in a home where the yard was decorated with pink flamingoes and statues of dwarf jockeys and elfs. Other people may feel differently. I suppose that's one of the reasons milady and I are so happy here: we can enjoy what we have without demanding that other people conform to our expectations. We don't waste a lot of time complaining about "differences in tastes and worlds," so we have a lot more time to waste on writing stuff like this.
I just love days like this one, when thoughts such as that one replace deep and dark concerns for the state of the nation. I guess I can live with the current occupant of the White House, but I do wish he'd purge his mind of "pink flamingoes" and dwarf ideas.
[Alright, I know . . . a contradiction, but that's only what's so . . . so what?]
It's not that it's all that bad, mind you, but the old engine that's chained up above the 1965 Massey-Ferguson tractor, and the greasy plots of grass surrounding the work area, are not the sorts of scenery that would appeal to buyers in search of "country living." Granted, the idea of country living held in the minds of most urban yuppies bears little resemblance to the real thing. You can't have cows without cow pats, and you can't have beautiful springtime apple trees without the autumn's itinerant workers and their litter. You can't have reality without reality.
Places where people live are never perfect, and a lot of the shortcomings trace to differences in people's tastes and necessities. I don't think I would ever want to live in a home where the yard was decorated with pink flamingoes and statues of dwarf jockeys and elfs. Other people may feel differently. I suppose that's one of the reasons milady and I are so happy here: we can enjoy what we have without demanding that other people conform to our expectations. We don't waste a lot of time complaining about "differences in tastes and worlds," so we have a lot more time to waste on writing stuff like this.
I just love days like this one, when thoughts such as that one replace deep and dark concerns for the state of the nation. I guess I can live with the current occupant of the White House, but I do wish he'd purge his mind of "pink flamingoes" and dwarf ideas.
[Alright, I know . . . a contradiction, but that's only what's so . . . so what?]
posted by Benedict S. at 11:15 AM
4 Comments:
If only the clutter in our minds were cleaned as easily as the clutter in our yards.......
So, you think it's easy repairing a 1965 Massey-Ferguson. Yeah, yeah.
Problem with the clutter in the brain is we can't tell the clutter from the good stuff.
In these squinting alleyways where a thought about
myself is too cumbersome, in this furrowed clutter
of the brain whih has long since refused to hold
the universe, where now keyed up, now scattered
you trundle your boots on the cobbled, checkered
squares, from a fountain and back to Caesar -
You ran. You broke a leg. But you have the knowledge.
The body is space's reversal, no
matter how hard you pedal.
The comet flies. It traces an ellipse. The Darkness Follows.
Who are you?
From Brodsky
Post a Comment
<< Home