appliqué

primal ache.

“Lewis learned one of the central lessons of wealth and wealth creation: being wealthy and feeling rich are often inversely correlated. In a room full of rich men, only one doesn’t feel poor by comparison. /// This lesson is often overlooked in the ongoing debate over income inequality. Just as people at the top of the income curve conflate being poor with looking impoverished, those as the bottom conflate being wealthy with feeling like Richie Rich. Confusion on either side breeds contempt, while obscuring the felt consequences of inequality, which in an affluent society can be a matter not only of material need but also of bitterness over one’s relative position. // Adam Smith understood this. The author of The Wealth of Nations regarded human beings as creatures of appraisal and ambition. Smith believed that whether we are busy trading gossip or exchanging goods, we are constantly sizing up the world around us in order to guarantee our safety and improve our place. Our measurements, as such, are not made according to some universal set of standards. We are each other’s yardsticks, and we hate it when we don’t come out ahead.

(…)

Some may argue that such distress is unworthy of being taken seriously, but “get over it” is a response more obtuse than enlightened, willfully indifferent to the role of personal pride in driving an economy and shaping our identity. We have to be honest in confronting the essential paradox of economic development, namely, that the wealthier a society becomes, the poorer many of us may end up feeling. Or, as a fellow trader replies when Lewis tells him of his own frustration, “You don’t get rich in this business. You only attain new levels of relative poverty.””

-“The Primal Ache: What Adam Smith Knew About Inequality,” Boston Review, by John Paul Rollert

key-note.

“Coketown, to which Messrs. Bounderby and Gradgrind now walked, was a triumph of fact; it had no greater taint of fancy in it than Mrs. Gradgrind herself. Let us strike the key-note, Coketown, before pursuing out tune.

It was a town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it; but as matters stood it was a town of unnatural red and black like the painted face of a savage. It was a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves for ever and ever, and never got uncoiled. It had a black canal in it, and a river that ran purple with ill-smelling dye, and vast piles of building full of windows where there was a rattling and a trembling all day long, and where the piston of the steam-engine worked monotonously up and down like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness. It contained several large streets all very like one another, and many small streets still more like one another, inhabited by people equally like one another, who all went in and out at the same hours, with the same sound upon the same pavements, to do the same work, and to whom every day was the same as yesterday and to-morrow, and every year the counterp[art of the last and the next.

These attributes of Coketown were in the main inseparable from the work by which it was sustained; against them were to be set off, comforts of life which found their way all over the world, and elegancies of life which made, we will not ask how much of the fine lady who could scarcely bear to hear the place mentioned. The rest of the features were voluntary, and they were these.

You saw nothing in Coketown but what was severely workful. If the members of a religious persuasion built a chapel there - as the members of eighteen religious persuasions had done - they made it a pious warehouse of red brick, with sometimes (but this is only in highly ornamental examples) a bell in a birdcage on the top of it. The solitary exception was the New Church; a stuccoed edifice with a square steeple over the door, terminating in four short pinnacles like florid wooden legs. All the public inscriptions in the town were painted alike, in sever characters of black and white. The jail might have been the infirmary, the infirmary might have been the jail, the town-hall might have been either, or both, or anything else, for anything that appeared contrary in the graces of their construction. Fact, fact, fact, everywhere in the material aspect of the town; fact, fact, fact, everywhere int eh immaterial. The M’Choakumchild school was all fact, and the school of design was all fact, and the relations between master and man were all fact, and everything was fact between the lying-in hospital and the cemetery, and what you couldn’t state in figures, or show to be purchaseable in the cheapest market and saleable in the dearest, was not, and never should be, world without end, Amen.”

-“Hard Times,” Charles Dickens

r1r2.

happy birthday happy birthday.

1937.

“Although most of the people remembered the time when the sky was black for two hours with clouds and clouds of pigeons, and although they were accustomed to excesses in nature - too much heat, too much cold, too little rain, rain to flooding - they still dreaded the way a relatively trivial phenomenon could become sovereign in their lives and bend their minds to its will. /// In spite of their fear, they reacted to an oppressive oddity, or what they called evil days, with an acceptance that bordered on welcome. Such evil must be avoided, they felt, and precautions must naturally be taken to protect themselves from it. But they let it run its course, fulfill itself, and never invented ways either to alter it, to annihilate it or to prevent its happening again. So also were they with people.

What was taken by outsiders to be slackness, slovenliness or even generosity was in fact a full recognition of the legitimacy of forces other than good ones. They did not believe doctors could heal - for them, none ever had done so. They did not believe death was accidental - life might be, but death was deliberate. They did not believe Nature was ever askew - only inconvenient. Plague and drought were as “natural” as springtime. If milk could curdle, God knows robins could fall. The purpose of evil was to survive it and they determined (without ever knowing they had made up their minds to do it) to survive floods, white people, tuberculosis, famine and ignorance. They knew anger well but not despair, and they didn’t stone sinners for the same reason they didn’t commit suicide - it was beneath them.”

-1937, “Sula,” Toni Morrison

hospitality.

“Recognition and respect cannot be sustained at the level of abstract claims or commitments. To have any meaning, they must be lived out in concrete everyday relations - in the family, church, community, and political sphere. Individual recognition and welcome into homes and close communities are essential. But so is recognition at the larger and more anonymous level of the state. Although impersonal and distant, political recognition and protection of individual worth and rights is crucial, and reduces the dangers of too narrowly bounded personal hospitality.”

-“Making Room,” Christine D. Pohl