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The Treachery of an Imagination
“The Gentler View,” Harper’s Weekly (January 29, 1910) : 27
U Michigan copy/scan (via hathitrust) : link
 

      The impression that an imagination is either interesting, advantageous, or creditable to its owner is absurdly wide-spread. With so many people possessed of busy, detailed imaginations, it is surprising that no one has made any attempt to expose the low, flighty things as they deserve. They rob one of half the pleasures in life, and because their owners have stupidly stood by them their reputations remain intact. It is not right. They should be known for what they are. And if their injured possessors were not held spellbound by their daring, it is probable that a great many hot words would have been heard before this.
      In the first place, a person with an imagination of any thoroughness is partially prohibited from all surprise, most action, and any real hope of speaking the truth. In the first place, a person with an imagination of any thoroughness is partially prohibited from all surprise, most action, and any real hope of speaking the truth. If one’s imagination has any talent for verisimilitude, it can with the greatest ease trick you into thinking you have experienced, said, and seen certain things, until you open your mouth with distrust, have not a shred of respect for your tongue, so easily does it allow itself to be imposed upon, and whenever you hear yourself speaking turn away your head in prophetic shame. When you offer your sympathy to a day laborer, or an old lady whose daughter persists in studying chemistry, saying, “I know how you suffer; I can sympathize,” it is not kind of her to look short and supercilious and say, “I’d like to know what you know about it.” But you know everything, as much as she, in fact. There is no point which your imagination has not shown you clearly. You have day-labored until the crick in your back and your leaden heart and the dry dirt on your hands were more than you could stand, and as for having a daughter twice your own actual age who would be plain and did not marry and could do such clever, unattractive things with her brain — Ah, how that girl has irritated and disappointed you in your old age!
      There is almost nothing you have not been through, and it requires the nicest sense of honor to confine your conversation to a recounting of those few experiences you could prove by circumstantial evidence. Your friends are the losers, of course, by your perhaps too nice honesty, but convention makes rigorous demands, and it is as well to refrain from speaking familiarly of things that happened before you were born, though you remember to a tremor your horror when your father in swaddling clothes fell into the water, and your relief when the trusty dog Rover pulled him out. It is nothing but gallant regard for your family that makes you omit a discription of how you jumped up and down on the bank crying, “Courage, father, courage”; and you remember as though it were yesterday how Rover shook himself when it was all over, and you think he licked your hand, though here you are a little uncertain, as much as to say: “I knew you’d want your father in the future. You’ll be glad I did this when it comes your turn to be born.”
      Anticipation, which is the source of so much pleasure to many people, is to those poor souls ridden by an imagination a burden and a shameless thief of the future. A caravan trip in Ireland is suggested to you as being a delightful way in which to spend your vacation. Instead of a vague intoxication following the idea, with only enough clearness regarding its possibilities to invite you the more, you decide what clothes would be necessary, get them, never like them, pack, get tired, sail, dislike the boat, meet one delightful person on it, arrive in Ireland, like the people, loath the weather, take cold, have an awful time bathing in a caravan, distrust the man who drives, grow bored and enchanted by turns; and before the idea has been in your head two days there is nothing you do not know about caravaning in Ireland, so that you are forced to spend your vacation in some place you had not thought of in order to benefit by the change.
      Knowing these tricks of your mind, you put great faith in the unexpected. The unexpected appeals to you, so that you plan out in marvellously exact detail every possible contingency, thus making the unexpected an impossibility and giving an absurd air of familiarity and homeliness to the maddest thing when it finally happens. Knowing these tricks of your mind, you put great faith in the unexpected. The unexpected appeals to you, so that you plan out in marvellously exact detail every possible contingency, thus making the unexpected an impossibility and giving an absurd air of familiarity and homeliness to the maddest thing when it finally happens. Realities become so superfluous and lagging. Think of wading through a thing when you have come out at the other end thousand times. One’s friends say, “Are you never going to marry ?” and one exclaims, quite taken aback: “Bless me, am I not married yet? Why, it was only the other day I was planning what kind of caps I should wear when I was a grand-mother, and feeling genuinely depressed because mauve did not become me. As for bringing up a family of boys, you know I’ve gone into that so thoroughly that I’d quite overlooked the fact that I had none. And then my husband losing his health and my becoming a war correspondent, and all that happened after that — it seems to petty and matter-of-fact to have to remind myself that I never had a husband. I was rather under the impression that I’d divorced him or mislaid him, so when you say you think I ought to go away back to the beginning of things and choose one, it seems so plodding and literal.
      Naturally, selling one’s thoughts for a penny was out of the question. One couldn’t. One would be ruined. Fancy saying to any one who had idly offered the infinitesimal price, “I was looking at the body of the person I had murdered” — here you hasten to add that it was no one in the least known to you — “and planning my hurried flight across Asia, assuming a different disguise at every station,” or, “I was deciding whether, if I looked exactly like the Queen of Spain, I should be kidnapped when walking on the East Side, and what I would suffer during my imprisonment.” These are things one cannot announce and continue to be regarded as a sane being; yet your treacherous imagination was working like a Trojan to make either of these things possible, building if on if, fitting facts to probabilities, and causing you, the practical unwilling house it inhabits, embarrassment and chagrin. yet your treacherous imagination was working like a Trojan to make either of these things possible, building if on if, fitting facts to probabilities, and causing you, the practical unwilling house it inhabits, embarrassment and chagrin. It is harrowing to have your imagination making such a spectacle of itself, and to know that at any minute a mind-reader may come swinging along and look in your direction.
      You are not in sympathy with it, you always tag protesting at its heels, begging that it be reasonable for once, repeating impatiently that you don’t want to fall off an ocean liner, and think it very unlikely that you ever will, so there is no need of knowing how to behave. But nothing will stop the activity of your plagued imagination. It thinks that to fall off the hurricane-deck would be interesting, says that if you will just wait a minute it will arrange what happened to make you lose your balance, who is to see you go, and how you are to be saved. You beg it not to bother on your account. It says, “No trouble, I’m sure,” and at last you have to go through the entire tiresome business, only to find that you look a fright choking and dripping, that all the passengers stare and ask stupid questions when you are revived, that you are cold, scared stiff, and have lost your carved combs while in the water. You are completely out of patience with your imagination for making you do so disagreeable a thing in order that it could get its regular exercise. You are in a bad temper and chilly the rest of the afternoon, and can think of nothing but the inconvenience of having a pampered imagination.
 

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