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The Tyranny of Buying
“The Gentler View,” Harper’s Weekly (June 19, 1909) : 27
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      Buying is beyond a doubt America’s national pastime, and there are moments when it looms up as the sole occupation of America’s women. One of the disadvantages of having money is that one, more or less, has to buy; one of the virtues of poverty is that one buys so few things one does not want. This is not written from a perverse desire to laud the lack we cannot fill, but because of a genuine discovery that buying is a burdensome business and that every ten dollars added to one’s income exposes the owner to ten possible purchases. Looking idly into a shop window with a full purse is rare; pressing one’s nose against the pane, choosing, and light-heartedly walking away is out of the question. If a purse contains as much as a small check from a kindly relative there is a sense of duty felt toward every jewelry-shop. No pausing outside with reckless enjoyment of diamond cows (a taste that none but penniless persons should enjoy), but a sober-minded entering of the terrifying door and an inspection of wares that exhausts the serious and the critical in your nature. Everything seen when there is superfluous wealth clinking in one’s pocket must be regarded with an appraising eye. To remark that a puppy or a pin pleases you is no light thing, but the forerunner of asking how much you like it. Enough to buy it? And if so, enough to pay the price or only enough to let it go after unsuccessful haggling? Think of the terrors that an otherwise enjoyable exhibition would take on if approached opulently! All peace of mind flying before the first twinge of admiration. You like impersonally a staircase: unluckily you can afford it; sadly you wonder if you ought to build a house to hold it. (That is, the writer supposes such things to work out in such a way. It may be as well to admit, before any accusations are made, that supposition is as near to the truth as she ever expects to get.) A cloisonné dragon delights the affluent eye; theoretically dragons are engaging beasts, and it would be pleasing to live on such terms with a dragon as to permit “My Dragon” for one’s habitual mode of address. Yet, liking dragons no matter how heartily, it is still doubtful to a penniless, well-balanced mind whether a dragon is going to enhance the charm of any home. And the sorrow of a person who buys a dragon because he likes it, yet does not know what to do with it when he gets it home and at last cries out in wobegone tones, “Will no one protect my home from my purchases?”
 
They are suffering the consequences of logic and unbroken sequence of thought. “Will no one protect my home from my purchases?” is not to be scoffed at or scolded, but to be deeply sympathized with. The helpless position of persons with loose change is now fully realized. The reason why their houses contain certain disquieting objects is at last clear. They are suffering the consequences of logic and unbroken sequence of thought. We, the itinerant beggars of the world, admire an altar; go quite mad over a column; speculate on how well a room could be made to conform to its beauty; decide on the price that would be asked — at which point we nod jauntily to the altar or the column and trudge on, forgetting it completely. But the case of the rich person is so different. The break never comes for such, no loophole presents itself; they baldly buy the altar (why not, as they like it?) and find it eternally disconcerting. They have the column sent home and bump into it to the end of their cluttered purchasing days.
      If all possibility of buying is brushed aside, if it can be made a thing of such rare occurrence as not to be taken into one’s every-day calculations, the consequences are varied and delightful. Spirits lighten in exact proportion to trunks. Spirits lighten in exact proportion to trunks. You scamper mentally and rush from one treasure to another with all the joy of a puppy tearing about a garden path. When buying is no longer imminent you balance rare diamonds against lapis lazuli, have the setting of each changed without the shopkeeper’s permission, and, while you wait, as it were, then at the last moment take neither, having with great suddenness learned to love a canvas seven feet high and as many across. Knowing that you have just enough money to buy tea without cake, you do not let your many loves upset you. Emphatically deciding that they could not be duplicated in loveliness, you return to the hotel and see the poor dear souls who bought the things they liked and are now obliged to wear them and pack them and pay duty on them. More than ever you are on good terms with your own favorites, though conscious that the first moment you like something better you will say so, forgetting your first find and not bound down to that tiresome imperative loyalty to all things belonging to you. A preference is so enjoyable an experience that it is obviously mismanagement to weigh it down with consequences. A preference endowed with boomerang qualities is a preposterous thing. A preference is so enjoyable an experience that it is obviously mismanagement to weigh it down with consequences. A preference endowed with boomerang qualities is a preposterous thing. We like clouds and apses, pinettas and brown babies, and never in our most heated moments do we contemplate buying them; yet let us feel equal enthusiasm for small, detached, inanimate, ticketed articles. And how many of us realize that, though we covet and admire and with difficulty remove our eyes and hands, we do not really want to go through the last terribly definite process of buying? There is far, far too much buying. We have paid the only price we should pay and bought the share we should have when we have admired a thing enough to make its ours. If we follow up our liking we only come to, not a making it more ours, but a making it less every one’s else. We push the rest of the world away from the object we like, call it completely ours, and what an anticlimax we have been guilty of! Not to mention that the moment we own it we treat it with all disrespect. Asking the opinion of every careless caller regarding it, allowing experts to expose its imitation legs, whereas when it was still in the shop we would have defended it with our lives.
      Never for a single moment is it meant that buying should be wiped out altogether; by all our proved jewels, no! There are some things which arouse such fervor in us that it stands to reason their greatest happiness lies in being with us. For our mutual benefit they are bought and at once placed on such intimate terms that it is only tactful to pretend there never was a time when they owed allegiance to another. Such exceptions are not even thought of in this protest against buying, and rightly, as possessions of this calibre are not bought, but pried away from wrathful keepers with the sharpest instrument one happens to have. It is the easy buying that galls, the buying that seems to be the first thought instead of properly the last. It is the easy buying that galls, the buying that seems to be the first thought instead of properly the last. This flinging of one’s net over everything that rears its head above the average is hardly mannerly. It savors of the grossly powerful conqueror who tries to carry away more than he is able and anchors himself with his pillage. To buy everything is like asking each agreeable chance acquaintance to become an inmate of one’s household. Let us learn to keep our hands off, bow the admiration that is due, and have the wit to pass on. The majority of beautiful things should receive in galleries at stated hours, like the personages they are, instead of being nailed to our crowded walls, exposed to our before-breakfast glances, and perhaps told to their faces that they do not wear well. “Wear well?” they might exclaim. “Wear well? Are we domestic pets that you expect us to share their characteristics?” It is a wonder that they do not develop motor power and escape from our crass strength.
      A twinge of concern is felt that the beautiful objects lovingly isolated in certain homes will feel themselves to have cause for indignation. If they demand an explanation it is given willingly and now. The foregoing words, though they may seem to cast a shadow on the ascensions of reigning treasures to the niches they now so becomingly fill, are in reality an effort to distinguish these from the rest of the material world. And if a cleared space can be made about them it stands to reason that everybody will have more air, more eyesight, less scattered affections; and the benefits resulting from this will surely be laid at the feet of, we fear, our slightly incensed objet d’art.
 

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