Flights of Fancy

A Jest

A few days ago I resolved to visit a friend in Broummana, so I went off to the garage to ask after a car that would carry me there.

The driver saw me approach and said: Mademoiselle, one minute and we're off... I looked, and found the car empty; and I hated to wait until God should provide the driver with four passengers besides myself...

(Mademoiselle, one minute... I have two passengers waiting in Furn el-Chebbak.)

Now there is nothing in the world I hate as I hate waiting in a car... And yet I got in, loath to disappoint the driver's hopes...

And I waited... a minute, two... ten... a third of an hour, and half an hour... an hour... Then two passengers came...

I called to the driver and said: Here we are, three — and there remain the two passengers of Furn el-Chebbak...

He said: (Coming, one minute, mademoiselle...)

And he left us waiting until he had finished his talk with the tout...

And the car set off for Furn el-Chebbak first, to ask after the two passengers... The driver did not know where the house was; he held in his hand a slip of paper with the address written upon it...

We stopped at a certain point, and the driver went about asking the grocer and the barber and the baker after that particular name. After much ado he found his way to the house and fell to sounding the horn... He raised heaven and earth before a middle-aged lady, loud in her finery, looked out and asked: (Are you the man sent from the Broummana garage?...) He said yes... And of course she had to take leave of the household with many kisses before she would come down... At last she arrived, and the driver asked her: Where is the second passenger? She said:

— She is my sister... she is at this moment visiting friends of ours on the way, and we shall pass by and pick her up.

The two passengers beside me cursed by all that is holy... As for the driver, he came near to cursing the woman herself.

And the car set off again in search of the place, the painted woman saying: Turn right... left... right... at the elbow... And we arrived... But (her sister), the second passenger — she too in the prime of old age — heard not a sound until the horn and her sister's calls had shattered the quiet of the quarter...

And we drove on to Broummana, my store of patience exhausted...

I asked the driver whether it was the company's custom to pass by and pick up passengers from their houses...

— He said: Sometimes... they do it by way of good publicity for the company, and to make things easy for travelers...

I laughed. If the company had gained two passengers, it had lost three... it had played havoc most hideously with their nerves... and made for itself the worst of all publicity...

And after all, is this not an exact copy of the mentality in which we think?...

This Electricity

Suddenly, as I sat bent over these flights of fancy, the electric light went out. Darkness settled over our house and the houses of the quarter... I closed my eyes, thinking of this electricity that paralyzes the life of our homes whenever its current chooses to fail, suddenly and without preamble — no light, no radio, no refrigerator, no washing machine, no iron, no, no...

And I thought how our grandfathers took their light from a wick dipped in olive oil, and then sat around it through long evenings of talk... And I wondered what sort of life they lived before they knew this electricity, and knew with it the radio and the washing machine and the refrigerator and the iron and all the rest.

But then I hit upon something they did know — something for which we would gladly sell the world... peace of mind.

Who, then, will take the car and the airplane and the radio and the refrigerator and the washing machine, and give us that in their stead?

The Currency of the Age

I was talking to a friend about a certain woman...

I said: Poor thing — don't you see that she lives on her nerves?

She said: And how is one to live in this clamorous, warring, jostling world, this world of push and shove, if not on one's nerves?...

I said... On other people's nerves... Do not ninety-nine percent of mankind live that way?

A Psychological Prescription

One of the great specialists in children's diseases made it his habit to write a single prescription for every thin child...

(This child must be loved at least once every three hours...) And I do not know why, after reading this charming item, I remembered the thousands of children who lack neither clothing nor food nor toys, but lack a thing begrudged them by two sorts of people...

Women who spend their hours between the market and the visit and gadding about here and there, leaving their children to the maid or to the mercy of God...

And men who believe that playing with their children is a lessening of their dignity as fathers.

To these I say... try the policy of love; it may succeed in delivering your children from their complexes where clothes and food and dolls have failed...