Habituated Eye
2016; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 124; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/sew.2016.0081
ISSN1934-421X
Autores ResumoHabituated Eye Sam Pickering (bio) “An unassisted transaction between an ordinary object and the dishabituated eye,” M. H. Abrams wrote, effected “miracles.” Breaking from ritual and habit, patterns of feeling and thinking, is almost impossible. “I am the door,” Jesus said in the book of John. “By me if any man enter in, he shall be saved and shall go in and out, and find pasture.” In fond moments people see themselves opening the door. In reality, however, the lock is proofed against imagined picks and passkeys. Only in fiction does the deadbolt occasionally loosen, this generally occurring after a funeral in order to let a soul drift through. “Is it possible,” my friend David asked me, “for a person to be happy?” The answer, as anyone beyond weaning realizes, is “no.” Because people cannot be other than dissatisfied; many dream of dishabituating themselves and miraculously slipping through the door into lush pastures. They think themselves chosen outsiders who see beyond the profane limitations of other people and of society itself. Alas, too frequently they bloat into righteous arrogance and become shrill critics. Because a multitude of small responsibilities preoccupies most people, self-anointed prophets often find themselves ignored and treated as nuisances. The “truths” they promote do not effect miracles, and as a result they become resentful and splenetic. Louis Auchincloss entitled a collection of his short stories The Injustice Collectors. The term, Auchincloss explained, described “people who are looking for injustice, even in a friendly world, because they suffer from a hidden need to feel that this world has wronged them.” All people experience slights and at times feel aggrieved. My life has been so comfortable that I shouldn’t complain about anything. The world has always been friendly and never wronged me, yet occasionally I react strongly to a silly slight. The muscularity of my reaction is a sign of weakness, not strength. Last month a stranger overheard me talking to a friend in a barbershop. “Where are you from?” the stranger inquired, barging into the conversation. I have heard that question almost daily since I left the South fifty years [End Page 417] ago. I usually smile wanly and say “Tennessee.” The answer and smile usually satisfy most strangers. My reply, however, did not satisfy the man in the barbershop. Without pausing he supplemented his initial inquiry with two other questions—how long I’d lived in Connecticut, and why I had not rid my speech of its “country sound” and picked up “a new England accent.” Because I had jogged eight miles that morning and was tired, I lashed out. “What!” I explained, “a New England accent—that mongrelized blend of bog Irish, swamp Yankee, Polish marsh, Russian steppe, and Italian boot? I’d rather be in Hell with my back broken than have a New England accent.” “You clearly know geography,” Vicki said later when I described the visit to the barber shop. “But your response was underbred. And aren’t you ashamed of resurrecting that decayed phrase about Hades and spinal injuries? You should know better.” I know better. I know pastel language soothes and massages, but the colorful and the outspoken so run through my family that dishabituating myself from them is impossible. Moreover, dishabituating would be a betrayal of me and my background or, in the richly paneled phrasing of the King James Bible, of “the side of the door from whence I came.” Last Thursday my childhood friend Andrew died. Instead of thinking about Andrew’s death, I thought about the funeral of his father. “Freddy,” Andrew’s father, had been an incorrigible and legendary man about town. At Freddy’s memorial service Andrew’s sanctimonious older brother John spoke. “On his deathbed,” John said, “Daddy stopped using bad language and came to know Jesus.” “My God,” my mother said later, “Must people always lie at funerals? Old Freddy would only have been interested in Jesus if Jesus wore a skirt, and he quit cussing because he was gaga and couldn’t speak a word.” Andrew was livelier than his brother, and I wondered and hoped that at the grave his friends quoted the punchline of his favorite joke...
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