“In headaches and in worry Vaguely life leaks
away” Auden
Jeremy
Hardy says that people from telesales cold call him and ask if he knows how
much he is paying for his house insurance. He replies, or wishes to, by saying:
“No, if I knew how much I was paying for my house insurance I would kill
myself.”
Life
is short and death is coming, getting and spending, the hell that is other
people and, what Larkin calls: “the whole intricate rented world”, it all takes
too much from us and we find no time for what matters.
So
why then would we rush headlong to meet that flood of money driven,
bureaucratic banality when it is painful enough to simply endure it.
Why
then would we do this:
“He had been looking forward to wearing his new George
pants”, imagine his pain, imagine being a man who looks forward to wearing new
George pants, go on, imagine it because I can’t. I can imagine plunging to my
death from a high building moments after the realisation that pant wearing had
become a thing I looked forward to.
“I guess I just unlucky”(sic) So unlucky that defective pants
seem like a thing worth spending time posting about: that would seem pretty
lucky to most of the world. She had checked reviews of George pants previously
too.
“What are you doing honey?”
“Oh just checking George pant reviews on the wallmart site”
Is this how it was, can it all really get this small, can
pants matter so much? Can we be mortified by defective pants? And can we really
spend our fragile lives considering whether our problems “speak to the overall
quality of those pants”?
I need to believe not, but there it is: a couple received
defective George pants, and nothing can ever be quite the same again.
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