Some people dislike the insistent drone of cicadas. Cicada-song grows intense in this part of the world in August. I consider it one of the greatest of nature’s sounds, comparable in beauty to waves hitting the shore. It drowns out man-made noise and calls to mind times past.

Jean Henri Fabre, the 19th century French entomologist, investigated the widely-held belief that the cicadas’ song was purely a mating ritual. His investigations probably would not meet modern scientific standards, but they are fascinating. He wrote:

For fifteen years the Common Cicada has thrust his society upon me. Every summer for two months I have these insects before my eyes, and their song in my ears. I see them ranged in rows on the smooth bark of the plane trees, the maker of music and his mate sitting side-by-side …. Whether drinking or moving they never cease singing.

It seems unlikely therefore that they are calling their mates. You do not spend months on end calling to someone who is at your elbow. Indeed I am inclined to think that the Cicada himself cannot even hear the song he sings with so much apparent delight ….

On one occasion I borrowed the local artillery, that is to say the guns that are fired on feast days in the village. There were two of them, and they were crammed with powder as though for the most important rejoicings. They were placed at the foot of the plane trees in front of my door. We were careful to leave the windows open, to prevent the panes from breaking. The Cicadas in the branches overhead could not see what was happening.

Six of us waited below, eager to hear what would be the effect on the orchestra above.

Bang! The gun went off with a noise like a thunderclap.

Quite unconcerned, the Cicada continued to sing. Not one appeared in the least disturbed …

I think, after this experiment, we must admit that the Cicada is hard of hearing, and like a very deaf man, is quite unconscious that he is making a noise.

(more…)

TH:  Good evening, and welcome to The Thinking Housewife. My guest tonight is the eminently fictitious Ellie Forthnaught, founder and sole proprietor of an interesting new venture in education, the New Wave Academy for Women.

Welcome, Mrs. Forthnaught.

Mrs. F:  Thank you. Thrilled to be here.

TH:  Mrs. Forthnaught, –  may we call you Ellie?

Mrs. F:  No, no. Please call me Andy. That’s what all my friends call me.

TH:  Fine then, Andy. Tell us about this idea of yours. I understand you intend to revolutionize women’s higher education in America.

Mrs. F:  Oh well, I’m no revolutionary really, but I recently announced – at a virtually unattended press conference in the nation’s capital – my plan for a chain of prestigious academies for young women. The start-up date is uncertain, but the plan calls for two dozen academies eventually, with four hundred students each.

TH:  This is serious. Sugar?

Mrs F:  Thank you.

TH:  And?

Mrs. F:  There’s likely to be one in every region of America. That’s the goal.

TH:  The name of these academies?

Mrs. F:  The New Wave Academy for Women.  It’s simple and memorable.

TH:  Are you wealthy?

Mrs. F:   Funding is uncertain. I don’t have any start-up funds as a matter of fact and I don’t expect to find sponsors soon.  The plan is well-developed and that’s what counts. Tuition should be in the range of $5,000 per year. I tried to crunch this number to make it less, but that would entail feeding the women only bread and water.

TH:  That’s unconstitutional.
 
Mrs. F:  That’s what I thought.

TH:  Now, these are four-year institutions. And, what will women study?

Mrs. F:  The first year will involve intensive de-programming of students. Most will have been exposed to pernicious ideas. At times, it may seem like breaking wild horses, but I assure you wherever there is error, truth tastes sweet. By the second year, the women will be ready to learn.

TH:  And, then?

Mrs. F:  Our subjects will fall into two categories. One, there will be traditional higher education courses in the liberal arts: history, literature, mathematics, science, music, art history, and philosophy. In short, the whole Gordian knot of human affairs and ideas will be crammed into their pretty little heads in an entertaining and compelling fashion. New Wave students will be chosen for their avidity for learning so this shouldn’t be much of a problem.

TH:  And, the second category?

Mrs. F:   The second category will involve the womanly arts, including homemaking, psychology, child development, domestic crafts, etc. Not too much, not too little. Most women today emerge from college tens of thousands of dollars poorer and with no inkling how to live their real lives, not the slightest knowledge about men or children, about sickness or health, about rich or poor. They are untutored. To put it unkindly, they are idiots, and have spent a small fortune becoming so.

TH:  Were you an … idiot once?

Forthnaught:   Me? Oh, fortunately I was interested in archaeology in college and in my senior year I went on an expedition in Crete with the famous Professor James Hoovenhollen.

TH:  The Professor Hoovenhollen?

Forthnaught:  I fell in love. We married and had six children.

TH:  But, your name is Forthnaught, Andy.

Forthnaught:  James died ten years ago. I am now married to Allan Forthnaught.

TH:  Not every woman can have a Professor Hoovenhollen, or a Forthnaught. What will New Wave women do when they graduate?

Mrs. F:  One question will be strictly forbidden in the hallways, the classrooms and the dormitories of New Wave. That is this: What will you do? This question regarding the young womens’ futures after graduation will have already been implicitly answered by their way of life and by the curriculum at New Wave.  What will they do? They will wrest civilization from the clutches of certain doom. What will they do? They will raise the next generation and love men. What will they do? They will perpetuate what is highest in their culture and extend the delicate bonds of community and family. They will defend beauty, guard revelation, and cherish the old and the sick. “But, what will they really do?” some will still demand to know. These are people who insist on one answer and are satisfied with only one answer. Here it is: New Wave Women will do nothing!

TH:  I foresee protests.

Forthnaught:  Yes, protests and pickets. From both the left and the right.
 
TH:  Have you ever been publicly flogged?

Mrs. F:  I expect things to calm down so the girls and my teachers can get to work.

TH:  This type of education, isn’t it … aristocratic? I mean, aren’t you imposing your values on others?

Mrs. F:    Once they go out into the world and astound people with their beauty and grace, their well-behaved and intelligent children, their contented marriages and their orderly homes, many people will accuse New Wavers of elitism. “Not everyone can be like that,” people will say, “and therefore no one should be like that.” This is the great leveling argument of democracy run amuck. We should all strive to live for money and only for money because some people are poor. We should all live for our jobs and nothing but our jobs because people need jobs. We should all have ill-kept homes and children who watch television because not everyone has orderly homes and children who play outside.

It’s strange but this same leveling argument is not applied to Old Wave Women. No one makes the same cry of elitism against the woman senator or the woman corporate executive or the teacher. Somehow she is permitted to reach the pinnacles of her endeavors without being accused of elitism. Why can’t domestic women excel at what they do? Odd, isn’t it?

TH:  You make it sound as if New Wavers will be perfect. You make it sound as if the whole world will be imperfect, except New Wavers.

Mrs. F:  The aspirations of our students will be perfect, not their lives. 

TH:  Let’s talk about funding.
 
Mrs. F:  I fear for the possibility of corporate sponsorship. New Wave women will make poor spenders compared to their mainstream counterparts. Frugality is one of the most charming of feminine arts. It is a social discipline, best practiced with like-minded others. Every day will be a Stone Soup day for a New Wave Woman if necessary. As long as she has a stone, her family and friends will eat.

Here’s what I figure. If New Wave women have an average of five children –

TH: Five!

Mrs. F:  Okay, six. If they have six children each, in 50 years the results of their work will be visible in hundreds of communities. People will wander into some of these lucky towns and notice something different. Residents say hello and smile. The rough edges are worn away and the hideous strip malls are gone. The children speak in full sentences and actually play outside. The old spend their days amid family. The food is delicious. Divorce is rare.

TH:  It sounds as if you are imposing your values on others, Andy.

Mrs. F:  New Wave is a school, not a prison.

TH:  Isn’t this an attack on non-New Wave women?
 
Mrs. F:  An attack?

TH:  It’s fine for you to do whatever you want in the privacy of your home, Andy. Go ahead and be recklessly domestic if you want. If you’re into nouveau-patriarchy, that’s fine. But, you shouldn’t impose it on society or on other women. That’s not right.

Mrs. F:  The school is voluntary.

TH:  But, the idea might spread!

Mrs. F:  I don’t believe –
 
TH:  Do you think men will… like New Wave Women?

Mrs. F:  New Wavers will gently persuade.

TH:  This isn’t Sex and the City, I see.

Mrs. F:   I’m hoping for even more academies someday, perhaps six in every state and five or ten in each major city.
 
TH:  Andy.

Mrs. F:  Yes?

TH:  Have you ever heard of fascism?

Mrs. F:  I used to tell my children they could have no dessert unless they –
 
TH:  That’s fascism, pure and simple, Andy.  Listen, before you go, could you describe for our readers your necklace? I can’t take my eyes off it.

Mrs. F:  Oh, this?  This is a bronze cast of a little medallion I found in Crete. You see, there’s a woman holding an urn on her shoulder.

TH:  It’s lovely.

Mrs. F:  It brings back great memories, memories of days sifting through antiquity with James, chisels in our pockets and dust on our shoes.

TH:  Did you ever regret giving up archaeology and becoming a nobody?

Mrs. F:  Me?  Why no, not for a second. I moved forward in my life.

TH: Forward?

Mrs. F:  That’s the opposite of backward.

(more…)

In an age when many people do not believe in immortality, Paradise is truly lost. Or is it?

I like to question people about their views of life after death or, as the case may be, of non-life after death. Often, their ideas do not include a heavenly resurrection, but a state of long and lasting sleep. “I will simply fall asleep,” they say. “I will close my eyes and never wake up.”

For them, there is Paradise.  Heaven is a very strong anaesthetic and a firm mattress. Perhaps the ceaseless vitality and busyness of modern life makes the idea of doing anything after death unappealing. This is the perfect reward for a life well-lived, an eternal coma.

On the face of it, immortal sleep bears the marks of common sense.  Death resembles sleep.  It resembles sleep if one has never seen real death, if one encounters the end of life only in its doctored form, with none of the gruesome grimaces a fresh corpse displays before the mortician arrives. 

The truth is the idea that the afterlife resembles sleep makes less sense than the idea of some form of resurrection.  Both beliefs imply immortality. To be in a state of sleep, one must exist. To rest one must breathe. What sort of God would want to superintend an eternal state of dormancy? 

I would not mind sleeping forever. Good night and Farewell. God of Endless Bedtime and Heavenly Mattresses, grant me a blissful sleep. A night of dreams. Dreams of Paradise, not fire.

(more…)

  "The business of her life was to get her daughters married; its solace was visiting and news."                                                                                          Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen Such is the bygone world of Austen's Mrs. Bennet, mother of the legendary Elizabeth Bennet, who ultimately lands the most grumpy and charming man in all English literature. It is rare, if not unknown, for a British mother to lavish attention on her daughter's marital prospects today. Young women enter the wilderness of contemporary love on their own. Karen from England writes: Up until recently, marriages in Britain were all but arranged in name. Parents, relatives and friends selected people who they thought were compatible. Men could not date women without being viewed and vetted by their familes and usually fathers. Courtships were conducted under the beady eyes of parents and marriages were sanctioned or vetoed by parents. Marriages which were not approved did not happen and the couple had no choice but to split or elope. Care and guidance was given to the selection of marriage partners with the essential criteria being compatibility. Often parental pressure was considerable. This was abandoned in the 1960s with disastrous consequences. Women now go to bars, meet men they know nothing about, and before long they are applying for a marriage licence or living with them. Parents have given up vetting partners and allow their offspring to marry anyone in the name of romance. The Royal family have even given up maintaining their tradititions. Our own…

  Karen from England writes in regard to Why We Must Discriminate: Men's jobs are no longer secure as a consequence of globalisation, economic collapse and recession. Therefore women cannot rely on men as providers. This leaves many women with no option but to pursue careers and develop their own financial independence which provides them with a security net in the event of things going wrong. I think that family life and the issue of women's roles cannot be resolved without major changes in society as a whole. Essentially that means reversing the cultural revolution and the process of globalisation. Laura writes: Karen makes an important point. The decline in the ability of men to support families is not due simply to the entry of women into the workforce. It is also due to globalization and excessive immigration. Families through working ever harder and thus destroying their own foundations have covered up and borne the brunt of the self-inflicted weakening of the economies of the West. The answer to this problem is not for families to continue to destroy themselves. The answer is not for the majority of women to be both breadwinners and breadmakers. The solution lies in the rebirth of economic nationalism. "We are not a commonwealth of consumers," Patrick Buchanan has said, but a nation of builders and producers, industrialists and farmers, information specialists and engineers. The American economy is a vast leviathan, potentially far more self-sufficient than we have allowed it to become, and the British economy is not to serve the world, but itself first.

  The discussion over my article Why We Must Discriminate continues. I am accused of "utter nonsense" in saying that the work lives of women interfere with family life and the stability of marriage. By the way, if you find the text of these pages too small to read, go to View in the task bar and then Text Size. Click on the larger size.

  Alexis de Tocqueville was a social prophet of the highest order. We ignore his acute descriptions of American society at our peril. Here is Tocqueville on women in America: Thus the Americans do not think that man and woman have either the duty or the right to perform the same offices, but they show an equal regard for both their respective parts; and though their lot is different, they consider both of them as beings of equal value.  They do not give to the courage of woman the same form or the same direction as to that of man; but they never doubt her courage: and if they hold that man and his partner ought not always to exercise their intellect and understanding in the same manner, they at least believe the understanding of the one to be as sound as that of the other, and her intellect to be as clear.  Thus, then, whilst they have allowed the social inferiority of woman to subsist, they have done all they could to raise her morally and intellectually to the level of man; and in this respect they appear to me to have excellently understood the true principle of democratic improvement.  As for myself, I do not hesitate to avow that, although the women of the United States are confined within the narrow circle of domestic life, and their situation is in some respects one of extreme dependence, I have nowhere seen…

I have never lived in the Kingdom of Domestic Perfection, but I've caught glimpses of it. Peering through its gleaming gates, I've seen its highways and well-lit interiors. Perhaps you already live there and know all about it. Then I don’t need to tell you that the skies are a consistent blue and it almost never rains. Except when rain is forecast. In the Kingdom, people are strong and industrious. Even in the car or at a desk, they are as healthy and vital as oxen at the plough. If intelligence is the steady application of the mental forces toward a tangible goal, they are highly intelligent. In Perfection, the stream of consciousness is no longer a stream. It’s more like the regulated flow from an engineered dam. And, people are grateful for that. No child is born without a reason. No life is continued without a reason. No love is given and no love received without a reason. Everyone is perfectly equal, as in 1 + 1 = 2 and 15 = 15. The men and women differ only in anatomical respects. The women enjoy football and the men cook. They cook dinner with like aeronautical engineers preparing for a test flight. The children are equal to adults in all essential ways, although it’s true they have physical inadequacies for a few short years. Before long, they make their own food and cure themselves when sick. They are content…

Psychologists have worked hard to prove sadness is pathological. They have redefined the black mood and demonized melancholy. They have packaged pessimism as depression and intensity as disorder.

The attempt to rid the world of sadness is totalitarian in nature. There is no happiness, no humanity even, without sorrow and despair.

Every human being finds a satisfactory answer to the riddle of life, or withers inside. In a world that has turned its back on truth and meaning, this answer is missing. For many, sadness is health. Sadness is resistance. Sadness is the subconscious refusal to surrender.

To take this sadness away by classifying it as disease is to remove the last traces of humanity. A machine never aches. A stone never weeps. The war against sadness calls for its counterpart: the war for sadness, the war for pain, the war for ten million tears, felt one by one.

(more…)

In an interview in the New York Times today, the photographer Lillian Bassman makes an interesting, politically-incorrect admission. When Bassman was young and newly married, she did not want children. Her husband did. So Bassman went to a psychotherapist. Within six weeks, her desire for children was awakened. She had a son and daughter.

An unmarried woman who chooses another life is not necessarily unhealthy if she does not want children. But, a married woman who lacks all interest in reproducing is psychologically abnormal. Unfortunately, in our world, this lack of interest is considered perfectly healthy, an assumption that keeps women from seeking help. Maternal desire is not always innate – and there is nothing shameful about it not being innate. But, it can be acquired.

Bassman became famous for her artsy erotic images of women in lingerie ads. Gina Bellafonte, the reporter, says Bassman was “advantaged” in her work with women because they felt more comfortable with a female photographer.

(more…)

    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.