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“Nothing of the Kind”
“The Gentler View,” Harper’s Weekly (August 10, 1912) : 23
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      It is invariably necessary to elaborate a theory with undue haste in order that you may state it to your own satisfaction before some one says, “Nothing of the kind.” Its frequently being oneself who ejaculates “Nothing of the kind” only serves to make the haste more precipitate. If one is ever to have the delight of bolting with an idea to which one afterward finds oneself impossibly ill-mated, one must bolt before one inspects the idea and without a single glance behind at one’s sober, irate self, who is racing to get within earshot in order to shout that tiresome phrase, “Nothing of the kind,” which immediately dissolves the union. If one is ever to have the delight of bolting with an idea to which one afterward finds oneself impossibly ill-mated, one must bolt before one inspects the idea and without a single glance behind at one’s sober, irate self, who is racing to get within earshot in order to shout that tiresome phrase, “Nothing of the kind,” which immediately dissolves the union. This is the reason why a determined talker dislikes speaking before his family and never permits his friends to interrupt him.
      He likes his ideas as ideas, not as truths, facts, or things applicable or workable. They are pleasanter to play with than golf-balls. If they are perversions or inversions, what is the inside of a golf-ball but a ball of twine fit for jackdaws? It is always easy to burst a bubble; the finesse comes in inflating the poor material lying about until it is of sufficient lightness and roundness to serve as a plaything. People of this way of thinking are frequently forced into writing. Not that there is any particular reason why they should write, except its conveniences for themselves. It permits them to dogmatize about rather underdone and highly flavored theories and get them into the post, and perhaps even into print, before that loud-voiced person, one’s sober self, shouts — what he is almost sure to shout on a closer inspection of the theory. It sometimes follows that this haste has the happy result of a half truth having been enunciated, when otherwise it might have been left forever fused with its half untruth. There is always for the writer the fun of temporary ardor for a thing which it was very diverting to feel scampering about in the mind.
      There is that amusing idea that marriage is an anodyne which the majority of people are forced to indulge in in order to get through the too poignant business of living. One knows at a glance that that is precisely the kind of idea that would lend itself to an escapade. It does a dozen things to tempt you to an elopement, and if weakness and susceptibility are your cardinal virtues you are off at a run on the instant.
      Celibacy is too keen, too rigorous and warlike and unprotected a condition for any but the dauntless to endure. Celibates are alone with themselves and life, two things that ninety-nine individuals out of a hundred have done their utmost to evade since the beginning of time. One has leisure if one is a celibate, and that is always a terrifying and exposing thing. Leisure must be made use of, if possible, conscientiously and with meaning. The burden of leisure to a thoughtful person leads to fundamental beginnings and back again to serious immediate action. Action, if one has had to furnish the need, impetus, and motive, is a Herculean task. Solitude is the most truthful of companions. Naturally celibates do the great creative work of the world. They encountered themselves; they got their relation to life; life itself brought consciousness and consciousness made them creative. But the travail of celibacy is obvious — one need not dwell on it; it is what we all fled from and flung ourselves from, panic-stricken into marriage.
      Marriage is so easy, so rudimentary, so much a first aid to the injured, the splints used being the first stiff thing that came to hand. In marriage you lose yourself, which is a tremendous responsibility off your mind. In marriage you lose yourself, which is a tremendous responsibility off your mind. A completely married person dies at the age of eighty with as little connection with anything but a few material expedients as a youth of fifteen. The men are so pressed by the duty of supplying dollars for their families that they are relieved of all other duties. They have none toward themselves, their former friends, the ideas of their age, the awesome questions, the refining side issues of subjectivity. They do not even have to decide whether they shall work for the amount that it is right that they should work. They have got to work and they have got to work as much as they can, and the need whips them into dulled, constant energy. At the end of their days they either did or did not fulfil that one duty successfully. One duty in a lifetime! Nothing but marriage could reduce complex life into such soothing simplicity.
      As for the women, they are far worse. A man may at least make money in divers ways, a woman can be married in but one way. The creed for the married woman is so clear that original thought is a hindrance to her and she abandons it at once. She surrounds herself with furniture, children, servants, and the mechanism of daily life until she is as distracted as a nun lost in a boiler-shop. She spends forty or fifty years putting things back into the place from which some one else removed them, and when she has so cluttered herself up that she could not find her way out of the maelstrom if she wanted to, she goes further to sleep by congratulating herself on her full, useful life. One has always had a perfectly good excuse for refusing to face realities. A social evil may be very terrible, but you cannot get excited about it if you haven’t a cook. You cannot have friendships, the most searching and delightful test of one’s worth, if you never have yourself. The life hereafter may make you pause, but you cannot get an attitude toward it when it suddenly occurs to you that one of the children cannot find his school-books and your husband’s grippe is worse. You cannot have friendships, the most searching and delightful test of one’s worth, if you never have yourself. If you can by marriage manage to make life a piece of ground glass and you an awkward blue-bottle buzzing to get through it, of course you marry, which of course every one has done and does and will.
      It was at this precise moment that Sober Self shouted, “Nothing of the kind!”
 

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