Little Packages

Women think in little packages. I understand nothing in the way their minds work.  They make an envelope for each subject, attach a label to it, and that's the end of the matter.  Little packages. Little packages.


---Edgar Degas, in conversation, Oct 1891 [included in the Degas exhibit at the Naples Museum of Art]


Hmmmm....Well, I've always heard that women were not terribly good at compartmentalizing.  According to Degas, that's a falsehood.  

Let The Air In

"I said the mountains looked like white elephants.  Wasn't that bright?"

"That was bright."

"I wanted to try this new drink.  That's all we do, isn't it--look at things and try new drinks?"

"I guess so."

The girl looked across at the hills.

"They're lovely hills," she said.  "They don't really look like white elephants.  I just meant the coloring of their skin through the trees."

"Should we have another drink?"

"All right."

The warm wind blew the bead curtain against the table.

"The beer's nice and cool," the man said.

"It's lovely," the girl said.

"It's really an awfully simple operation, Jig," the man said.  "It's not really an operation at all."

The girl looked at the ground the table legs rested on.

"I know you wouldn't mind it, Jig.  It's really not anything.  It's just to let the air in."

The girl did not say anything.

"I'll go with you and I'll stay with you all the time. They just let the air in and then it's all perfectly natural."

"Then what will we do afterward?"

"We'll be fine afterward.  Just like we were before."

"What makes you think so?"

"That's the only thing that bothers us.  It's the only thing that's made us unhappy."

The girl looked at the bead curtain, put her hand out and took hold of two of the strings of beads.

"And you think then we'll be all right and be happy."

"I know we will. You don't have to be afraid.  I've known lots of people that have done it."

"So have I," said the girl.  "And afterward they were all so happy."

"Well," the man said, "if you want to you don't have to.  I wouldn't have you do it if you didn't want to. But I know it's perfectly simple."

"And you really want to?"

"I think it's the best thing to do.  But I don't want you to do it if you don't really want to."

"And if I do it you'll be happy and things will be like they were and you'll love me?"

"I love you now.  You know I love you."

"I know.  But if I do it, then it will be nice again if I say things are like white elephants, and you'll like it?"

---Ernest Hemingway, "Hills Like White Elephants"

It isn't the unnamed operation that is the subject matter of this quote that interests me, but its painful recognition of the ephemerality of any moment of well-being or balance.  That desire to return and recapture an earlier idealized state--things "like they were"--  is universal.  Flinging open the window, or here in this passage, "let[ting] the air in" in the more clinical sense, seems to promise to end stuffiness, to restore simplicity and clarity.  The girl knows better.  Returning to the ideal state once the line has been crossed is a near impossiblity. 

Don't Chase Boys

 Or so suggests William Dean Howells in this quote taken from his novel of 1882, A Modern Instance. In this scene, a mother and father contemplate their daughter's engagement to a slick journalist.  We might think of their advice as the nineteenth century rendition of the more familiar parental refrain.   Sound advice?  Or perhaps not?  Twenty-first century parenting might sound a bit different...

"He's smart enough, "said Mrs. Gaylord, as before.

"M-yes, most too smart," replied her husband, a little more quickly than before. "He's smart enough even if she wasn't, to see from the start that she was crazy to have him, and that isn't the best way to begin life for a married couple, if  I'm a judge."

"It would killed her if she hadn't got him.  I could see 't was wearin' on her every day, more and more.  She used to fairly jump, every knock she'd hear at the door; and I know sometimes, when she was afraid he wasn't coming, she used to go out, in hopes't she sh'd meet him; I don't suppose she allowed to herself that she did it for that--Marcia's proud."

"M-yes," said the Squire, "she's proud.  And when a proud girl makes a fool of herself about a fellow, it's a matter of life and death with her.  She can't help herself.  She lets go everything."

---William Dean Howells, A Modern Instance  (1882)