For the reading of it

I recently finished reading Edith Wharton's "The House of Mirth", which had been offhandedly given a tenuous thumbs up by Anna many many years ago when she went off to college and I looted the books in her room that were not deemed important enough to accompany her. It was, indeed, very good, especially for the kind of drawn out victorian novel that I expected it to be. It was basically about this attractive 29-year old named Miss Lily Bart going about living her elaborate social life in New York in 1900, attending parties and looking for a husband to take her out of her poverty. There are numerous important plot turns and it all ends quite tragically (as the inside cover put it), but the thing that struck me was this line, somewhere, about how to Lily it was important to live wealthily, or at least giving the appearance of being wealthy, because a live of poverty is practically not worth living.

I guess I remembered this phrase above others because it made me realize that I've somehow acquired an analogous value, if you replace wealth with something like being social and having lots of friends and exciting moments of passionate feeling. I can't put one word to my values the way Edith Wharton can to a character in a book, but maybe someone seeking to find the most laughable about me could. Anyway, one of my biggest fears is having my life reduced to a monotony of *getting up, going to work, coming home, eating dinner, occupying myself in some retarded and uninspired fashion with some menial task like washing dishes or laundry or cleaning the bathroom or watching tv, and then going to sleep, and repeating from (*) ad infinitum. This lifestyle wouldn't necessarily be objectionable if I had no other options, but the objectionable part is having other options, having access to life's more titillating pleasures (or pastimes) and not partaking of them because of inertia. And by tittilating pleasures, I mean things like inviting friends over for fun, whacky, and/or noisy parties, going out dancing or hiking or wandering the city streets at 3 am, taking up a hobby and getting sufficiently non-sucky at it to be able to impress ignorant onlookers...the kind reader gets the idea.

I'm not going to go into whether or not this is a reasonable thing to fear, and what kind of spoiled brat this might make me. I've thought about whether this fear is justified or not (it's probably not), about whether there's anything wrong with a simple lifestyle (when you put it this way, there probably isn't). The point is that I have this fear and that it's a pretty big part of how I perceive my life. I maybe be a snooty stuck up brat (much like the fictional Lily Bart) but the point here is not that I should try to become less of one.

Back to the point--I'm afraid of falling into this kind of lifestyle. And compared to what college was like, this last year has been, socially, a narrowing of my world. I don't hang out with friends as often as before. In part, I haven't wanted to. I haven't had any big parties like the housewarming tea party or pirate party of years past. I've frequently thought that it would be cool and fun to do, but ultimately I haven't done it. And that's okay, because I haven't really wanted to badly enough, but whenever I contemplate the matter I'm plagued by a fear that if I don't kick my social life back into the gear it used to be in, my world will slowly shrink into dull nothingness and I will end up an old stiff-nosed crotchety woman who wears starched vests and walks about town with her nose high in the air and a thin condescending smile towards all the fun things of life. That would be kind of sucky, because I want to partake of the fun things in life.

I guess my fear of not having an exciting social life starts from my earliest memories, where fun things were equivalent to parties and lots of other people being around. And having parties requires some amount of social capital (and funds too, enough to feed people or at least enclose them and give them a place to sit, but I'm ignoring that for now because that cost need not be high). But, as I learned, having parties is a good way for me to feel that people like me, but it's not always very fun or very fulfilling for me. And so sometimes it feels like I put all this energy into something that I don't actually enjoy, but just do because somewhere, somehow, I've gotten the impression that that's the only way to live life.

In reading "The house of mirth" I felt like, on one hand, I could understand all these people's needs to outdress and out-entertain their co peers, but on the other hand, the struggles of victorian high society seem so petty. For the first time, though, in reading about the petty lives of rich people, I didn't feel like I was above their petty struggles because I work for a living, dammit (or could potentially, at any rate, but that's another story). Now I understand that a lot of these rich conceits stem from that same desire to make live be about something more than making a living and getting by each day. And so I empathize with those fictionalized stories instead of scorning them, because this same desire is the source of many of my insecurities about how I'm living my life.