Tuesday, February 17, 2015


  "The secret of hut happiness is that it represents the acceptance of the commonplace emotion. This may be a dignified contentment in mediocrity in which is the only justification for life. Life cannot find its warrant in the exceptional experience of restlessly successful ambition, but must look for it in the normal happenings of commonplace folk. Life cannot be squared to reason if it insists upon distinction or unusual achievement or unusual experience. That would be seeking a value in exemption from the common lot. It would imply or insist that the normal was unsatisfactory or unworthy, and it would be a denial of justification to the whole scheme.
  There may be ecstasies in distinction, but there is value only in mediocrity, or rather, if there be no value in mediocrity there are no values at all. If the physically and spiritually pleasant sensations of hut happiness, heightened by appreciation of the small detail of day to day existence, be not esthetically complete, then life is a failure for all except Caesar. Humans cannot admit that their masses are merely fertilizer for the rare bloom which alone can justify them.
  Normal sensations of health, normal observations and perceptions may not be ecstasy, but they must be sufficient. That does not deny ambition its place, but it takes the agony out of egotism. A rational acceptance of life, a plate of buckwheat cakes and a dish of bacon in the morning, a day of work, a return to fire, fleshpots, carpet slippers, and a book, the light of the moon, Venus and Jupiter, and this rounded out by sleep into twenty-four hours is an entity which needs no other justification." Clifford Raymond.


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