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The Senseless Necessities
Harper’s Weekly (January 16, 1909) : 33
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      It is often asked with a flourish of the voice and a wag of the head which are supposed to stagger one, “What are the necessities of life?” Every one, after drawing deep breaths and downing a natural nervousness that will rise, begins to find an answer. Some say that to be happy — an attempted happiness is the popular interpretation of life among the strangely light-hearted of the populace — one must have work, love, and parenthood. Others choose as necessities health, social intercourse, and hope, and one woman says that all any one needs is bounce. Perhaps, after all, it is. Bounce appeals to one as a thing amazingly useful in time of need. And if people were well supplied with bounce their friends would not worry for their future, but could send them on their bounding way with confident heart. The virtues of bounce grow on one. It is the greatest of pities we haven’t all got it.
      When the few people with already formed ideas on the subject of what is necessary have spoken there are millions of abashed ones left who agree ardently with each of the speakers, yet who have not any of the necessities named and still manage a fair amount of happiness. They are quite upset, for nothing so jars your self-respect as to agree with everybody; an open mind always feels to the owner so peculiarly like unoccupied space. They wonder uncomfortably what they base their claims to contentment on. They do not mean to cheat, they are sorry to be pleased with any but the best, yet they are not parents, they do not work, and they do not love any one in particular. That is, not at present. Running quickly over the list of things they enjoy — they are in reality in panicky pursuit of that safeguard known as a conviction — they come to yawning, surprised to find it among the first of their likes. Yawning? Yawning? A most curious preference, and yet on second thought it comes to them that yawning is as agreeable a sensation as anything that at the moment occurs to them. Not that they for a moment wish to pit yawning against parenthood. Still the thing has given them pleasing moments, it is one of the experiences that make them beam so amiably on the world and it should undoubtedly receive full recognition. They are a little ashamed of it, but flaunt it, nevertheless.
      Then there are breakfast and the dripping of rain from the eaves. Devoid of bounce, with the other necessities lacking, one still smiles at breakfast, particularly if there is toast and if one is a little late, while the drip of rain outside causes one to give one’s self over to a moment’s complete, sheltered, warm, dry delight. A person robbed of work, health, parenthood, etc., and at once plunged in despair deserves the highest praise. He seems a remarkable character, possessing the highest ideals, fanatical in his loyalty to limitations. We wonder disconsolately if we can ever be like him. Tramps ought to dissolve from excess of unhappiness, but none of them have done so yet, and though from their whining tales of misery they would perhaps be open to reason and might be convinced that they were not happy, still we suspect them of concealing from us certain enjoyments to which they are devoted. They cannot deny that they have going to sleep and waking up, two entrancing occupations. (Waking up, particularly. It is such a joke on one.) And it is just possible that they consider the coursing of their blood through their veins sufficient excuse for going on. Well, it is not a completely boresome experience. Few of the functions of nature are. Think of the pleasure that great minds have derived from eating; in fact, it takes a fairly brainy person to appreciate food; and then there was the mạn who said he felt the keenest pride while digesting, it was so clever of his organs to know how to do it. He never got over congratulating himself on their actually being able to manage the thing. It is all very well to be proud of one’s children, but why not be proud of one’s joints too; they are just as remarkable.
      Coming into a warm room after a walk in the cold and sitting with the quietness of a log while some one rattles the tea-cups — at such moments one has a knowledge of something beyond mere work, one catches a glimpse of ecstatic insensibility, and all the other necessities seem mere irritants as one views them from the depths of one’s blissful lethargy. These are, one makes no attempt to deny, frankly material pleasures, but, after all, the material is one’s body and so one is by way of giving a miracle its due of attention. Laughing was left out of the list, with a carelessness which one hopes indicates no real decadence in the moral declarers of necessities, but one cannot be sure, for laughing is almost the only necessary thing. Not a mere sense of humor only, that doubtful endowment which so nearly into a religious cult some two years ago and brought most dangerous consequences in its train, but a hearty guffaw that shocks the hopeful, healthy, socially inclined ear of working parents, a peal that threatens to choke you, and that proves how neatly the point of the joke has caught you in the ribs. Yet these people who drew up the things without which one could not be happy omitted this. As though the precious things they included would have been worth a blind man’s glance without. it.
      Going on is necessary to us, if one must dig to the bottom of the bag — only let us not forget that by forever plunging in our arm to the very depths we force out the lightest things which were meant to remain on top, and give the entire contents an excessively mussed appearance — the delightful process of living along is one of the few things we feel to be imperative, and never have we found anything to match it for absorbing detail. Big things one so quickly becomes accustomed to that when they are taken away they are like the stars and one does not realize for a long time that they have gone; but little things, how they excite and thrill one. The inexplicable joy of being alone, and the unbounded charm of not being alone. Two such possibilities should suffice to fill the life of any one, and as for proving you were right in the face of figures to the contrary, and kicking leaves that rustle, pretending to be bigger than you are, making impossible plans, dreaming, watching the tangles of one’s friends, inhaling fresh air, seeing new places, digging in a garden, being impudent, winking a variable eye, rubbing smooth surfaces, getting muddy, staring, being stared at, rising to heights that are not one’s own, swaggering, reforming — these are the senseless necessities, and may we fail to do without them for eons to come.
      We work because we must, we do all our duties because public opinion yanks us by the scruff of the neck and hangs us up on the hooks where we belong. When we obey the laws of nature it isn’t because they are necessary to us, it is because we are necessary to them, and they have their way with us. We go through our steps, marry, have children, work, hope, keep what health we can, seek the society of our fellows, exhibit bounce if we are lucky, but these are not the things that lead us on, that convulse us, that catch our eye and delight us, without which we are limp bored rags. We are fish (the hook metaphor will kindly be forgotten at this point) going with the current. The kind of fish we are and the sea we are going to are subjects too large and uncertain for us to bother with, but the bubbles that flash in the sunlight, the way the water slips over us, the worms the nervous fisherman drops by mistake, the swaying grass, the bugs on the surface, the naturalists murmuring on the bank, and the dark caves we flash unexpectedly into, these are the things that are necessary to us. It is over these we wave our tails, and it is the blessed, varied, pointless details that make the stream so uncommonly fascinating to us.
 

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