Florida Pier : writings and about / jmcvey.net
Random Reflections
“The Gentler View,” Harper’s Weekly (April 13, 1912) : 26
Purdue copy/scan (hathitrust) : link
archive.org : link
It would be so nice if we could find those houses where our servants were before they came to us. We hear so much about them and they sound so remarkably nice. There never was a servant that has not been in one of these perfect places, and we feel it to be small wonder that they show such warm loyalty to their late employers. There everything went well. Roses that die for you are simply inexplicable, because the gardener says that “at my last place” they lived and grew to astonishing heights on precisely the same treatment. Roses that die for you are simply inexplicable, because the gardener says that “at my last place” they lived and grew to astonishing heights on precisely the same treatment. He naturally does not suggest a cure for what by all the known laws should be a triumph and yet mysteriously is not. If he commits some particular stupidity and you tactfully suggest, as though it were a sudden inspiration of your own, the right and obvious method, and ask if he does not think it would be very nice to do it that way he says, “Oh, I always did it that way at my last place.” Such a retort has the most silencing effect, because you see that he was either intelligent in his last place — which is simply unaccountable or else stupid, but with the most brilliant results — which was almost equally amazing. As he has fallen off at a truly depressing rate since then you must, as far as he or you can see, be the one to blame. Régimes that do not agree with your baby or horse or hedge always worked “in my last place.” The baby throve, the horse got well, the hedge sprouted in the “last place”; and the silence, the accusing silence that follows such a statement, is very hard for you to live through with pride undaunted. A definite charge can be refuted, but an implied comparison of your subtle influences against the subtle influence of the “last place” with results of an uncommonly disconcerting order before your very eyes sometimes results in your place becoming the real “last place,” which raises in your mind the tantalizing question whether you have the extreme pleasure of being an irritating perfection to the people in the next “place.” It is nice to think that, though we never know those ideal last places our servants come from, we may happily gain the distinction of becoming one of them should the servant ever do anything so ingratiating as to leave.
Order is what we are all aiming at, and in spite of the apparent confusion and chaos, order is what we hope for soon or some day, according to our employment and temperament. Half the disputes and wrangles and untidiness of life come from conflicting ideas of order. Statesmen are trying to get the country into order, doctors are trying to get bodily systems into order, golfers are trying to put their digestions in order, mothers are trying to get their households and their children into order, and you are trying to get yourself into order. The greatest scientists like to assure themselves by a life’s devotion that there is order back of the height of green beans, and philosophers, with their souls straining at the leash of ignorance, feel they have accomplished something if, after much elimination and many comprehensive hypotheses, they have proved an orderliness too large for us to conceive. It would seem as though order had some innate characteristic which would define itself to each of us in the same way...
Provokingly enough, the order of other people drives us to distraction. It would seem as though order had some innate characteristic which would define itself to each of us in the same way, so that, there being one thing in the world we are all agreed in wanting, we would always, so far as our intention went, be wholly understandable to one another.
Provokingly enough, the order of other people drives us to distraction. They will not give way to our ideas and we cannot give way to theirs, because, as we both so strongly feel and so convincingly state, order is order. But out of the kaleidoscope called life we each pick out according to our preference and powers of vision a certain perfectly geometrical design and that for us is order. Every tiny speck that is not included in our design is but something to be eliminated, and if it happens to be the pivot of our neighbor’s pattern, why, then there is all manner of recrimination, and no amount of explanation does the smallest particle of good. In fact, it only disorders your relation with that person, for if your design only takes in a few of the bits of glass picked out by your neighbor, or perhaps takes in none at all, you have both insulted his cherished symbol and claimed value for something that he, being unable to see, knows does not and cannot exist.
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