Oxo Good Grips Clam Knife
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Clam shuckers at work in front of Shucking Shed Two at Babbington Clam, about 1925. Herb (out of sight in shed at extreme right) is at work constructing the new culling table.

hat I can read and be happy while I am reading, is a great blessing.  Could I have remembered, as some men do, what I read, I should have been able to call myself an educated man.  But that power I have never possessed.  Something is always left, — something dim and inaccurate, — but still something sufficient to preserve the taste for more.  I am inclined to think that it is so with most readers.

f Muriel had hoped that a mutual esteem would spring up between her father and her betrothed during this week-end visit, she was doomed to disappointment. The thing was a failure from the start. Sacheverell’s host did him extremely well, giving him the star guest room, the Blue Suite, and bringing out the oldest port for his benefit, but it was plain that he thought little of the young man. The colonel’s subjects were sheep (in sickness and in health), manure, wheat, mangold-wurzels, huntin’, shootin’, and fishin’; while Sacheverell was at his best on Proust, the Russian Ballet, Japanese prints, and the influence of James Joyce on the younger Bloomsbury novelists. There was no fusion between these men’s souls. Colonel Branksome did not actually bite Sacheverell in the leg, but when you had said that you had said everything.
     Muriel was deeply concerned.
     “I’ll tell you what it is, Dogface,” she said, as she was seeing her loved one to his train on the Monday, “we’ve got off on the wrong foot. The male parent may have loved you at sight, but, if he did, he took another look and changed his mind.”
     “I fear we were not exactly en rapport,” sighed Sacheverell. “Apart from the fact that the mere look of him gave me a strange, sinking feeling, my conversation seemed to bore him.”
     “You didn’t talk about the right things.”
     “I couldn’t. I know so little of mangold-wurzels. Manure is a sealed book to me.”

HILISTINE, n.  One whose mind is the creature of its environment, following the fashion in thought, feeling, and sentiment.  He is sometimes learned, frequently prosperous, commonly clean, and always solemn.

he extent to which our sense of humor can help us to maintain our sanity is the extent to which it moves beyond jokes, beyond wit, beyond laughter itself.  It must constitute a frame of mind, a point of view, a deep-going far-reaching attitude to life.
   A cluster of qualities characterizes this peculiar frame of mind: flexibility, in this case an indvidual’s willingness to examine every side of every issue and every side of every side; spontaneity, his ability to leap from one mood or mode of thought to another; unconventionality, his freedom from the values of his time, his place, and his profession; shrewdness, his refusal to believe that anyone—least of all himself—is what he seems to be; playfulness, his grasp of life as a game, a tragicomic game that nobody wins but that does not have to be won to be enjoyed; and humility, that elusive quality. . . . A man who can shrug off the insufficiency of his ultimate wisdom, the meaninglessness of his profoundest thoughts, is a man in touch with the very soul of humor.
   Each of these six qualities plays its part in the drama of the humorous outlook.  The starring role, however, is reserved for another characteristic.  We may call it the enjoyment of the ironies that permeate our lives.  In order to command a therapeutic sense of humor, we must become acutely aware of the anomalies that run through all human affairs.  We must come to know, not theoretically but practically, that the happiest relationships are larded with suffering, that the greatest accomplishments are anticlimactic, that rational acts are motivated by irrational drives, that psychotic thinking makes excellent sense.  We must know that assertiveness is the mask of fearfulness, that humility is a kind of pride, that love is a euphemism for lust, that truth is the pawn of fashion, that we cherish our misery, and that we all are more irrational than we acknowledge.

here is, after all, something peculiar about the process of habituating oneself in a new place, the often laborious fitting in and getting used, which one undertakes for its own sake, and of set purpose to break it off as soon as it is complete, or not long thereafter, and to return to one’s former state.  It is an interval, an interlude, inserted, with the object of recreation, into the tenor of life’s main concerns; its purpose the relief of the organism, which is perpetually busy at its task of self-renewal, and which was in danger, almost in process, of being vitiated, slowed down, relaxed, by the bald unjointed monotony of its daily course.  But what then is the cause of this relaxation, this slowing-down that takes place when one does the same thing for too long at a time?  It is not so much physical or mental fatigue or exhaustion, for if that were the case, then complete rest would be the best restorative.  It is rather something psychical; it means that the perception of time tends, through periods of unbroken uniformity, to fall away; the perception of time, so closely bound up with the consciousness of life that the one may not be weakened without the other suffering a sensible impairment.  Many false conceptions are held concerning the nature of tedium.  In general it is thought that the interestingness and novelty of the time-content are what “make the time pass”; that is to say, shorten it; whereas monotony and emptiness check and restrain its flow.  This is only true with reservations.  Vacuity, monotony, have, indeed, the property of lingering out the moment and the hour and of making them tiresome.  But they are capable of contracting and dissipating the larger, the very large time-units, to the point of reducing them to nothing at all.  And conversely, a full and interesting content can put wings to the hours and the day; yet it will lend to the general passage of time a weightiness, a breadth and solidity which cause the eventful years to flow far more slowly than those poor, bare, empty ones over which the wind passes and they are gone.  Thus what we call tedium is rather an abnormal shortening of the time consequent upon monotony.  Great spaces of time passed in unbroken uniformity tend to shrink together in a way to make the heart stop beating for fear; when one day is like all the others, then they are all like one; complete uniformity would make the longest life seem short, and as though it had stolen away from us unawares.  Habituation is a falling asleep or fatiguing of the sense of time; which explains why young years pass slowly, while later life flings itself faster and faster upon its course.  We are aware that the intercalation of periods of change and novelty is the only means by which we can refresh our sense of time, strengthen, retard, and rejuvenate it, and therewith renew our perception of life itself.  Such is the purpose of our changes of air and scene, of all our sojourns at cures and bathing resorts; it is the secret of the healing power of change and incident.

his evening . . . I was standing in the main street, joking with my old shopkeeper friend, when I was suddenly accosted by a tall, well-dressed runner who thrust a silver salver at me, on which lay several copper coins and a few pieces of silver.  Since I had no idea what he wanted, I shrugged my shoulders and ducked my head, the usual gesture for showing that one has not understood or does not wish to.  He left as quickly as he had come, and then I saw another runner on the opposite side of the street, occupied in the same fashion.
    I asked the shopkeeper what all this was about, and he pointed with a meaningful, almost furtive glance to a tall, thin gentleman, dressed in the height of fashion, who was walking down the middle of the street through all the dung and dirt with an air of imperturbable dignity. . . .
    “That is Prince Pallagonia,” said the shopkeeper.  “From time to time he walks through the city collecting ransom money for the slaves who have been captured by Barbary pirates.  The collection never amounts to much, but people are reminded of their plight, and those who never contribute during their lifetime often leave a considerable legacy to this cause.  The prince has been president of this charity for many years now, and has done a great deal of good.”
    “If,” I said, “instead of spending vast sums on follies for his villa, he had used them for this cause, no prince in the world would have accomplished more.”
    My shopkeeper disagreed: “Aren’t we all like that?  We pay gladly for our follies but we expect others to pay for our virtues.”

eality is the beginning not the end.

o tell a long story about how I missed life through decaying morally in a corner, not having sufficient means, losing the habit of living, and carefully cultivating my anger underground—really is not interesting; a novel needs a hero, but here all the features of an anti-hero have purposely been collected, and most of all, the whole thing produces a bad impression, because we have all got out of the habit of living, we are all in a greater or less degree crippled. We are so unused to living that we often feel something like loathing for “real life” and so cannot bear to be reminded of it. We have really gone so far as to think of “real life” as toil, almost as servitude, and we are all agreed, for our part, that it is better in books [on TV]. And what is it we sometimes scratch about for, what do we cry for, what do we beg for? We don’t know ourselves. . . . Look harder! After all, we don’t even know where “real life” is lived nowadays, or what it is, what name it goes by. Leave us to ourselves, without our books [TV sets], and at once we get into a muddle and lose our way—we don’t know whose side to be on or where to give our allegiance, what to love and what to hate, what to respect and what to despise. We even find it difficult to be human beings, men with real flesh and blood of our own; we are ashamed of it, we think it a disgrace, and are always striving to be some unprecedented kind of generalized human being. We are born dead, and moreover we have long ceased to be the sons of living fathers; and we become more and more contented with our condition. We are acquiring the taste for it. Soon we shall invent a method of being born from an idea. But that’s enough; I shall write no more from the underground.