......................................................................................
......................................................................................
Dreams
......................................................................................
......................................................................................
Delightful, right off the bat.
................................................................................................
"The most extraordinary dream I ever had was one in which I fancied that, as I was going into a theater, the cloak-room attendant stopped me in the lobby and insisted on my leaving my legs behind me.
"I was not surprised; indeed, my acquaintanceship with theater harpies would prevent my feeling any surprise at such a demand, even in my waking moments; but I was, I must honestly confess, considerably annoyed. It was not the payment of the cloak-room fee that I so much minded--I offered to give that to the man then and there. It was the parting with my legs that I objected to.
"I said I had never heard of such a rule being attempted to be put in force at any respectable theater before, and that I considered it a most absurd and vexatious regulation. I also said I should write to The Times about it.
"The man replied that he was very sorry, but that those were his instructions. People complained that they could not get to and from their seats comfortably, because other people's legs were always in the way; and it had, therefore, been decided that, in future, everybody should leave their legs outside.
"It seemed to me that the management, in making this order, had clearly gone beyond their legal right; and, under ordinary circumstances, I should have disputed it. Being present, however, more in the character of a guest than in that of a patron, I hardly like to make a disturbance; and so I sat down and meekly prepared to comply with the demand.
"I had never before known that the human leg did unscrew. I had always thought it was a fixture. But the man showed me how to undo them, and I found that they came off quite easily.
"The discovery did not surprise me any more than the original request that I should take them off had done. Nothing does surprise one in a dream."
................................................................................................
"I dreamed once that I was going to be hanged; but I was not at all surprised about it. Nobody was. My relations came to see me off, I thought, and to wish me "Good-by!" They all came, and were all very pleasant; but they were not in the least astonished--not one of them. Everybody appeared to regard the coming tragedy as one of the most-naturally-to-be-expected things in the world.
"They bore the calamity, besides, with an amount of stoicism that would have done credit to a Spartan father. There was no fuss, no scene. On the contrary, an atmosphere of mild cheerfulness prevailed.
"Yet they were very kind. Somebody--an uncle, I think--left me a packet of sandwiches and a little something in a flask, in case, as he said, I should feel peckish on the scaffold."
................................................................................................
"The number of so called imaginative writers who visit the moon is legion, and for all the novelty that they find, when they get there, they might just as well have gone to Putney. Others are continually drawing for us visions of the world one hundred or one thousand years hence. There is always a depressing absence of human nature about the place; so much so, that one feels great consolation in the thought, while reading, that we ourselves shall be comfortably dead and buried before the picture can be realized. In these prophesied Utopias everybody is painfully good and clean and happy, and all the work is done by electricity."
Apart from that last, one has to wonder if he read a contemporary George Bernard Shaw, and if so, did he envy, or even comprehend, the stature. Then again, Jerome K. Jerome was far too immersed in his religion to be able to appreciate anything slightly outside it's bounds, so it's unlikely he understood Shaw.
................................................................................................
He begins thus with the familiar side splitting, humour of his, to begin with.
But soon enough, the author turns to his yearning, to serious thought. In this, he was not quite so successful, though it might not have been evident in his time. His disdain for electricity, for example, was out of place, as we know now well over a century later.
And, too, his imagery about human thought being a slow growing tree, not fireworks, is yet quite incorrect. We know now how soon after he wrote this it came about like a series of thunderbolts when relativity, atom structure and splitting, radium and more revolutionised the world of thought, as much as flights and phones and computers did everyday lives.
................................................................................................
................................................................................................
................................................
................................................
September 12, 2020 -
September 14, 2020 - September 14, 2020.
Golgotha Press
2010
...............................................
................................................
