| Show perversity OF THE INANIMATE defies explanation of logic reason or science A well known writer was found one morning by his family when they came down to breakfast groveling on the floor beneath the sideboard writes evelyn sharp british novelist in the manchester guardian 1 I am looking for my piece of bacon he be explained when althou al h accustomed to his curious temperament they asked for afi an explanation this story was told me in illustration of tile the absentmindedness absent mindedness of 0 a charming man of letters there was I 1 may add no piece of bacon under the sideboard when they looked for it but to me it bears a different interpretation terp on this occasion I 1 do not think lie he was absentminded absent minded at till all I 1 think he hc was wrestling with the devil that habitually enters into some common object of the household and whisks it away into space it Is a devil that bents beats us its all and I 1 have no difficulty in believing that the piece of bacon really leaped from his plate and shot under the sideboard and then disappeared no one who has possessed a pair of scissors or spectacles a pencil or a knife or a piece of india rubber or an ear trumpet Is in a position to doubt his assertion reason leason I I 1 admit Is against this theory ot of tile the capacity for locomotion shown liy by the inanimate but I 1 do not pretend that there Is any reason in the matter I 1 am stating facts and everybody knows it Is a fact that the pen you put down on the table a moment ago simply vanished while you walked across the room to consult a book and then when you had wasted several minutes in turning the room upside down in a vain search for it reappeared where you originally left it the pen may be a needle or a hammer or a bunch of keys or a pipe its ability to dis a aind reappear without human agency Is the same in each case the only exception to this rule Is provided by the box of matches which requires no supernatural aids to disappearance most mysterious of all Is the itinerary of the object that vanishes where does my fountain pen go when my back Is turned and before it returns to where I 1 left it itt I 1 it if I 1 knew that I 1 suppose I 1 should know ado w how to exorcise permanently the deol that enters into the inanimate object and gets the better of in me e every time 1 I do not really want to exorcise him ile he Is almost the last relic in a material age of those things that c cannot annot be explained away by reason or logic or science the magic of the inanimate Is a thing to be accepted not a thing to be proved I 1 can tell you it it Is there but it if you do not see it I 1 cannot make you believe me the best kind hind of truth Is like that ni as every child can tell you who knows that as soon as he goes to sleep his playthings become alive besides in spite of the power of the inanimate to exasperate us at every turn in our daily life it holds at least one vestige of consolation for animate nature as represented by us can we wonder when pens and pencils and pipes behave as they do unprovoked that the human race strung to it a finer scale and stranded in a world filled with inanimate objects remains perverse Incalculable prone to wayward action a and quite unable to account for its own I 1 |
