Still Life with Lemons and Oranges
July 17, 2009
A Dessert, Raphaelle Peale, National Gallery of Art
If human beings had no need for variety – and for alternating stillness and activity – there would be no need for domesticity. We could live like horses in penned pastures. Day after day, the same grass, the same sky. We could live like well-oiled furnaces, humming and churning without skipping notes. We could be as static as rocks, as un-various as concrete, as free from melancholy and joy as the sand on the beach.
As soon as he gets over the shock of his arrival, an infant looks about him. He looks about and wants more. More of something. He will never be satisfied with the same thing over and over. Even his moments of stillness contain the search for variety.
Our domestic lives would be formulaic and simple if we were formulaic and simple. The housewife would have nothing to do. She too could join the mechanical flow.
