Certain Personal Matters | Page 3

that my Aunt Charlotte could have travelled among the
Japanese nation. She would, I know, have called it a "parcel of trash."
Their use of paper--paper suits, paper pocket-handkerchiefs--would
have made her rigid with contempt. I have tried, but I cannot imagine
my Aunt Charlotte in paper underclothing. Her aversion to paper was
extraordinary. Her Book of Beauty was printed on satin, and all her
books were bound in leather, the boards regulated rather than decorated
with a severe oblong. Her proper sphere was among the ancient
Babylonians, among which massive populace even the newspapers
were built of brick. She would have compared with the King's daughter
whose raiment was of wrought gold. When I was a little boy I used to
think she had a mahogany skeleton. However, she is gone, poor old
lady, and at least she left me her furniture. Her ghost was torn in pieces
after the sale--must have been. Even the old china went this way and
that. I took what was perhaps a mean revenge of her for the
innumerable black-holeings, bread-and-water dinners, summary
chastisements, and impossible tasks she inflicted upon me for offences
against her too solid possessions. You will see it at Woking. It is a light
and graceful cross. It is a mere speck of white between the monstrous
granite paperweights that oppress the dead on either side of her.
Sometimes I am half sorry for that. When the end comes I shall not care

to look her in the face--she will be so humiliated.

THE TROUBLE OF LIFE
I do not know whether this will awaken a sympathetic lassitude in, say,
fifty per cent. of its readers, or whether my experience is unique and
my testimony simply curious. At anyrate, it is as true as I can make it.
Whether this is a mere mood, and a certain flagrant exhilaration my
true attitude towards things, or this is my true attitude and the
exuberant phase a lapse from it, I cannot say. Probably it does not
matter. The thing is that I find life an extremely troublesome affair. I do
not want to make any railing accusations against life; it is--to my
taste--neither very sad nor very horrible. At times it is distinctly
amusing. Indeed, I know nothing in the same line that can quite
compare with it. But there is a difference between general appreciation
and uncritical acceptance. At times I find life a Bother.
The kind of thing that I object to is, as a good example, all the
troublesome things one has to do every morning in getting up. There is
washing. This is an age of unsolicited personal confidences, and I will
frankly confess that if it were not for Euphemia I do not think I should
wash at all. There is a vast amount of humbug about washing. Vulgar
people not only profess a passion for the practice, but a physical horror
of being unwashed. It is a sort of cant. I can understand a sponge bath
being a novelty the first time and exhilarating the second and third. But
day after day, week after week, month after month, and nothing to
show at the end of it all! Then there is shaving. I have to get shaved
because Euphemia hates me with a blue jowl, and I will admit I hate
myself. Yet, if I were left alone, I do not think my personal taste would
affect my decision; I will say that for myself. Either I hack about with a
blunt razor--my razors are always blunt--until I am a kind of
Whitechapel Horror, and with hair in tufts upon my chin like the top of
a Bosjesman's head, or else I have to spend all the morning being
dabbed about the face by a barber with damp hands. In either case it is
a repulsive thing to have, eating into one's time when one might be
living; and I have calculated that all the hair I have lost in this way, put

end to end, would reach to Berlin. All that vital energy thrown away!
However, "Thorns and bristles shall it bring forth to thee." I suppose it
is part of the primal curse, and I try and stand it like a man. But the
thing is a bother all the same.
Then after shaving comes the hunt for the collar-stud. Of all idiotic
inventions the modern collar is the worst. A man who has to write
things for such readers as mine cannot think over-night of where he
puts his collar-stud; he has to keep his mind at an altogether higher
level. Consequently he walks about the bedroom, thinking hard, and
dropping things about: here a vest and there a collar, and sowing a
bitter harvest against the morning. Or he sits on