28
PARTISAN REVIEW
murmur sweetly. We discover that any conversation on the furniture
subject invariably ends in nastiness.
And why indeed should it not, considering what is really at
issue? For make no mistake about it, this choice between a functional
and a nonfunctional living-room is no simple aesthetic-practical de–
cision; like becoming a true disciple of Consumers' Research or sub–
mitting oneself to a budget counselor, it hits at the core of our moral
organization. This is a religious option we are being offered by the
preachers of the Life Sensible-salvation through common sense–
and no less exalted for staying with the mundane, no less evangelical
for being addressed to us in the language not of faith but of reason.
It is rational to get every penny's worth out of your dollar, it
is
ra–
tional to keep an eye on the future, it is rational to brush your
teeth with salt and cover your chairs with washable plastics. But it
is not only rational, it is also virtuous; and what is even more im–
pOltant, the opposite of rationality is sin. We have only to live func–
tionally, sensibly, with everything proper for its place and never a
misspent penny or a wasted ounce of energy to insure heaven on
earth.
If
we live personally, idiosyncratically, by impulse or taste,
all we can be promised is ruin.
VVell, it happens of course that people of education and taste
are peculiarly sensitive to the imagination of catastrophe, especially
if the disaster can be construed as punishment for their own failures.
Our instinct to prodigality is matched only by our fear of its dire
results, and in our endemic anxiety we are readily moved to what–
ever protection is presented
us
in the shape of rules, measures, good
resolutions. When, to boot, one takes into account the fact that we
all of us read
Robinson Crusoe
in our youths and that buried be–
neath our aptitude for self-indulgence is the counter-principle-a
romantic ideal of ultimate necessity and sparseness-one must begin
to understand why the Sensible Livers have such an easy time of it
when they abjure us to cut away all excess....
November 6
If
I had written yesterday and recorded the depression I felt,
would I have wanted this record to stand a month or even a week
from now? I was in a funereal mood, as if I had lost the company
