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Great Happenings
“The Gentler View,” Harper’s Weekly (October 21, 1911) : 34
Purdue copy/scan (via hathitrust) : link
 

      We continually state that what we want most is to live. We demand distinct happenings with the greediest frequency, and give the general impression to ourselves and others that we feel far too big to rest long content with the unimportant daily events with which one is obliged to put up for great stretches of time together. During the quiet round of half mechanical duties we long for the stimulus of something in the least cataclysmic. It need not necessarily wreck us, but we fancy there would be a zest in its turning us topsy-turvy. Our conversation is full of such phrases as “the main current of things,” and “the big world,” as being places unhappily far from us, where great things constantly occur, and where we would be infinitely more at home than in the quiet eddy in which we find ourselves.
      Then something does happen, something bigger than we, and our reaction to it smacks strongly of the comic. For a day we are intoxicated by what we have passed through, and we live that day operatically, with noble strides and grandiloquent gestures in our mental processes. But after the shortest time possible a self-consciousness sets in and we feel as ill at ease as though we had really been drunk and had yet to be accepted back into society as one of its respectable, unobtrusive members. The big event was stimulating, we liked the temporary enlarging of life’s proportions, and it will comfort us in future cramped moments to contemplate what we have passed through. Now, however, the big moment is over and we must in some way reduce ourselves to a size compatible with daily life. An emotional giant may enjoy his dimensions, but if he is living in a house of average size he feels silly at not more nearly fitting the furniture.
      The way in which we manage the matter of taking up once more ordinary activities is to reduce what happened, to cover it over with ineptitudes and triteness until it makes hardly more than a lump in the regularly strung beads of our days. We have muffled its gaunt outlines, and we, who longed for great events, breathe more easily when the reducing process is completed. A week is almost sufficient to accomplish our re-establishment in comfortable inanities First every one describes what each felt during the occurrence, the absurd irrelevancies, the abstractions and fatigues. The very extent to which we were taken out of ourselves but serves us with incidents on which to hang laughing exaggerations. We dissect the incident until it falls about us in medium-sized pieces. We proceed to compare these with like incidents known by hearsay; there is not one of those even distantly concerned who has not known some one to whom the same thing has happened, so that presently the great event seems less lurid than is generally the case, or so usual as to be barely interesting, and this attitude is quickly followed by a feeling of anti-climax, a regarding of the event as rather worn subject; and finally one is jogging on, with the event tucked safely into the past, and with a slightly abashed smile in one’s inner consciousness that bigness does well to come to us rarely since we are so put to it to know what to do with it when it appears.

A Common Iniquity
      It may not be a common iniquity that is about to be described, yet it probably is, as the majority of our sins are shared and the most humiliating quality they have is their commonness. This sin is a small one, as are all those we confess to and speak of with easy, if self-condemning, fluency. It is nothing more than a trick of imagining that people who irritate us, and whom we weakly permit to continue irritating us, do it once too often, and that we proudly put them in their places. Long moments of our idle thoughts are spent in this fashion, always, be it said, to our own shame. The irritating folk do something of a truly unbearable nature — we never hesitate to invent an act for them far worse than any they are capable of, and we, with all the calm, dignity, sweet hauteur, and scorching scorn that we have never been known to show, utter a few succinct remarks which cause the irritating person to fade into space while we walk slowly away, sorrowful if still stern, leaving without a backward glance the spot she once dared to blot with her presence. The satisfaction we get from such imaginings is of a blissful nature. Those succinct sentences are gone over and over, lovingly strengthened, made more bullet-like in their compactness, until we have compressed in their short length all that we have desired to say on the countless occasions when we have allowed the irritating person to run wild and spiritlessly remained silent. We adore the private lawlessness of picturing her as so unmitigatedly black, we swell with pride at the perfection of our own behavior, we repeat the incident a childish number of times, that its balm may sink into our tried nerves, and we feel freed because of having in our thoughts extinguished the person, blown a mighty gust and seen her lamely snuff out. It is when we are fresh from such triumphs and strutting, though knowing we should blush instead, that the irritating person suddenly appears with an unvanquished actuality almost inconceivable. The concrete, unharmed thereness of the creature takes one’s breath away. Doesn’t she know that she is finished, non-existent. It is our surprise at her corporeal flagrancy that prostrates us, paralyzes us to such an extent that we make no attempt to govern or reprimand her. We just stare and stare and marvel that any one can “be” as glaringly, as invulnerably, as that.
      The idea will come into our head that she knows to what lengths of audacity we have just gone. It is as though she had caught us in the act of blowing our mighty gust at her, and instead of going out she looms hugely; and we not only fail to make our succinct remarks, but we gush forth amiability, and chatter with conciliatory meekness, for though she may not have divined the lengths we went, we know, and we know we owe her compensation.
 

8 August 2026