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DOMESTICITY

 

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Without our quite noticing it, and to our immense misfortune, the value of domestic life has come to occupy a degraded position in our collective vision of importance. The pleasures and challenges of managing a household can be made to seem almost comically trivial in comparison with making a great fortune in business, succeeding in sport or entertainment, or occupying a prominent place in the media. Yet the small, bounded, repetitive issues of the domestic realm play a great part in the essential task of living and dying well. ‘If we wish to be happy, we must learn to cultivate our garden’ was Voltaire’s legendary and deliberately unheroic advice on the matter. A consequence of our disregard for domesticity is that we often become enraged by what we consider ‘small’ irritants. Couples fall out spectacularly over whether it is necessary to use a chopping board when cutting bread, how clean the bathroom needs to be or whether it matters if a drawer is left slightly open. What fuels the conflict is a sense that these are trivial matters, unworthy of careful discussion, on which there may be varied and dignified schools of thought. The fiendish irony is that we behave with exactly this respect around other details that matter much less in our lives. Art historians will hold an international conference on the pose of a hand in a painting by Picasso; huge corporations will devote immense efforts to finding just the right words to announce the merits of a chocolate bar to the world. We don’t always despise details; we are guided by the larger cultural picture of whether a detail deserves attention. Tragically, our culture currently assigns precious little importance to a great many details in the ‘garden’ of domesticity


This article is from The School Of Life 

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