Page 513 - Word Power Made Easy: The Complete Handbook for Building a Superior Vocabulary

SESSION 39

This world, Robert Louis Stevenson once claimed—with, I think, questionable logic—is so
full of a number of things that we should all be as happy as kings.
I doubt very strongly that happiness comes from the outside, or that kings are necessarily
happy. But I will go this far (and no further) with Stevenson: the world is certainly full of a
number of things. For instance, poverty and misery, hospitals and insane asylums, slums
and racial restrictions, cut-down forests and once fertile lands becoming progressively more
arid, war and death and taxes and bumbling diplomats. I know that Stevenson had a

di erent sort of thing in mind, for romantic poets tend to view the world through rose-
tinted spectacles, but it is often necessary to counter one extreme with another—and I
simply wish to set the record straight.
In this chapter we are going to discuss a number of things to be found in the world and in
the minds of its inhabitants—poverty and wealth; secondhand emotions; the relativity of

time; praise of various sorts; small talk and how to indulge in it; animals; longings for the
past; sounds; eating habits; and many kinds and conditions of secrecy.
As you see, when you start exploring ideas, as we constantly do in these chapters, you
never know what will turn up.

IDEAS

1. for want of the green stuff

There are those people who are forced (often through no fault of their own) to pursue an
existence not only devoid of such luxuries as radios, television sets, sunken bathtubs,
electric orange-juice squeezers, automobiles, Jacuzzis, private swimming pools, etc., but

lacking also in many of the pure necessities of living—su cient food, heated homes, hot
water, vermin- and rodent-free surroundings, decent clothing, etc.
Such people live:

in penury

2. at least watch it

All normal people want and need love and at least a modicum of excitement in their lives
—so say the psychologists. If no one loves them, and if they can nd no one on whom to
lavish their own love, they may often satisfy their emotional longings and needs by getting
their feelings secondhand—through reading love stories, attending motion pictures,
watching soap operas, etc.

These are: