Culture
Commercial, but Not Purely Commercial
The unvarying routines of doux commerce are the frame for civilized human life.
Arriving back in the small town in England in which I live (at least part of the time) after an absence of three months, I was pleased, and reassured, to find the same shops and shopkeepers that I had left behind. Quite apart from the fact that I like the owners of these shops, and wish them well, I have reached the stage in life when I dislike change of almost any description in the small amenities of life that I now enjoy. Among other things, such change would be a reminder of how little time I have left to enjoy them. I prefer the illusion of permanence.
How pleasant it is to enjoy an unvarying running joke with a young lady with laughing eyes who serves at an excellent fruit and vegetable stall every Friday and Saturday market under the arches of the 17th-century town hall! Once, having shopped there for essentials such as asparagus, strawberries, and artichokes, I accidentally left a bouquet of flowers I had bought earlier. When I returned to retrieve it, this young lady, with mock sorrow, said that she had thought that the bouquet had been for her. I said, “I am very sorry, not this week,” and ever since she asks for her flowers whenever I see her. Every week, I think up a new excuse.
This slight and silly running joke is very soothing. It reassures us that our relations, though they are commercial, are not purely commercial, but also human: that we are not simply interchangeable objects, mere functions of an economist’s analysis, and that we recognize one another as individuals. We do not make the same joke with everyone, only with one another.
As I go round the town, it is the same with everyone I deal with. For example, when I returned home, one of the tires of my car was slightly flat, and the car in any case needed servicing. I learned to my chagrin (and with a very slight tinge of disappointed outrage, which I kept strictly to myself) that the manager, whom I have known for 17 years and who has always provided honest and reliable advice, was intending to retire in a year and a half’s time. How dare he! Here was a manifestation of mutability when it was immutability that I longed for.
I asked him what he intended to do in his retirement, and he told me that he had always been a keen photographer. One thing led to another in our conversation, and we were soon discussing the horrors of modern British architecture, which has left no town untouched and unruined. We had discussed many other things in the 17 years of our acquaintanceship, which was commercial in its origins, and no doubt fundamentally remained so, but it was not only commercial. Montesquieu, it was, who remarked on the softening of manners brought about by commerce, at least at this level.
I discuss her back problems with the flower stallholder, who has recently undergone characteristically useless surgery, commiserating greatly with her; the weather and its vicissitudes with the delicatessen stallholder, for whom the temperature is never, and has never been, right; and the problems of fish-farming and declining fish stocks with the fish stallholder—who has come every week, almost unfailingly, for the last 35 years. If he does not come, it is because the boats have not been out for the previous two or three days owing to storms.
I admire someone greatly who can stick so long to his job and still say that he enjoys it. He always addresses me loudly as “Doctor,” as if he wants everyone to know that I was a doctor and is proud to have so august a personage as myself as a regular customer. How he discovered that I was a doctor, I do not know—but of course, in a small town, nothing remains secret for very long. Our first plumber, who died recently of a heart attack outside a pub in which he had had a slight altercation, had a brother who did time for murder—as everyone was to inform me many years ago.
I suppose that humanity may be divided into those who are excited by change per se and those who are fearful of it per se. For myself, I always recall the opening lines of Doctor Johnson’s great fable, The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia:
Ye who listen with credulity to the whispers of fancy, and pursue with eagerness the phantoms of hope; who expect that age will perform the promises of youth, and that the deficiencies of the present day will be supplied by the morrow, attend to the history of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia.
Johnson proceeds to show that every form of life, however attractive, has its drawbacks, and that, simultaneous desires being contradictory, dissatisfaction is the permanent condition of mankind. As he says through one of his characters, you cannot simultaneously drink from the source and the mouth of the Nile. This is not depressing; it is reassuring.
No doubt those who are not avid for change might be accused, not altogether unjustifiably, of cowardice, complacency, and nostalgia. Nostalgia in particular is deprecated because it is apt to overlook dishonestly, or to brush over, the discomforts and tragedies of the past. But it seems to me that anyone who has lived for any length of time and does not experience nostalgia must either have had a truly and consistently terrible existence (as, no doubt, some people have had) or be a miserable ingrate, and dishonest in a way precisely opposite to that of a person who lets himself be dominated by nostalgia.
The best-adjusted person is one who both hopes for progress in particularities and understands that there are inherent limits to progress as such. No glorious unclouded future awaits us; on the other hand, it is perfectly possible that in the years to come no one will die of malignant melanoma. Once that happy situation is reached, no one will look back and sigh for the days of fatal malignant melanoma. In fact, everyone will soon forget that they ever existed.
A balance between a sense of personal agency to bring about progress and an acceptance of the inevitable limitations of human existence is the beginning of wisdom. Very few, however, are the wise, and I am not sure that I am among them.
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