impress, they and the other expatriate women were less concerned with impressing others than with enjoying life. Oh, I know I’m idealizing them, but if you compare their lives to the lives of the fathers who had earned the fortunes they lived on, or the brothers who had the privilege (and pain) of continuing in the fathers’ footsteps, the difference between a life lived to gain profit and prestige and a life lived largely for its own sake is clear. Some of these women worked, of course. Stein had to write to earn money; Adrienne Monnier and Sylvia Beach built businesses, but their business was books, which yield more pleasure than profit.
Since the demise of a leisure class (which I do not lament), only a small elite live for pleasure. But nowadays it is not a group accidentally made rich by a forebear, but a self-selected group composed of ordinary people who make a determined choice to move to Vermont or some other rural area and live frugally by distilling maple syrup, or some such thing. They include graduate students on tiny stipends who make their fellowship a private aristocracy, academics who trade wealth for a life immersed in thought or art. I have lived this way since 1968, although I always worked hard and had no money until after The Women’s Room was published, in 1977. Those of us who choose pleasure without money lack the smashing high style of people of wealth, however. This is a loss, but I could not forget that while these women were striding around being brilliant and glamorous, my grandmother was working in a sweatshop and weeping every night for the children taken from her and put in an orphanage. Yet I hate ruining every image of style and ease by puritanical disapproval.
The next book I read served as a serious corrective to this lovely vision of life. Death Without Weeping , by Nancy Scheper-Hughes, describes a town the author calls Bom Jesus, a slum in northeastern Brazil, inhabited by cane cutters recently removed from their land, working wives, and their children. The author, an anthropologist, brought her own children with her on at least one stay in the town. Her motherhood was part of the impetus behind this book, an anatomy of horrible poverty and disease (owing to things like wages too low to feed even one person, much less a family, polluted water, lack of social services), because the author was so horrified at the fact that the mothers of Bom Jesus do not weep when their infants die—as they regularly do.
But what horrified me most in her vivid picture of the lives of these people, what remains with me still, is how their culture succeeded in brainwashing them, even without television. The people are black, and so poor that they are often starving. But they do not know it! They have lost touch with their bodies. Observing the Portuguese who lived in the city, they saw tall, straight-limbed, healthy white people. They concluded that their own problems with diseases they called nervos , gastos , and foma were a consequence of their race. Starving, they went to a doctor , who, although he had to know better, gave them prescriptions for tranquilizers! When their infants cried out of hunger, they gave them sugar water laced with tranquilizers. Of course the babies died.
On Tuesday, September 15, Rob and Gloria accompanied me to my oncologist’s. I had missed my previous monthly checkup because I was in the hospital. Gloria questioned the doctor far more intelligently than I could have; knowing she had telephoned Dr. Kelson, the head of the gastrointestinal department, some weeks before, he treated her warily. (I had not known about this and was privately delighted. Only recently have I discovered that he informed her the average survival time for patients with esophageal cancer was eighteen months—six months longer than my oncologist said. But never, then or later, did she indicate that she had been told this.) The oncologist directed me to have a CT scan to see if the chemo had
Since the demise of a leisure class (which I do not lament), only a small elite live for pleasure. But nowadays it is not a group accidentally made rich by a forebear, but a self-selected group composed of ordinary people who make a determined choice to move to Vermont or some other rural area and live frugally by distilling maple syrup, or some such thing. They include graduate students on tiny stipends who make their fellowship a private aristocracy, academics who trade wealth for a life immersed in thought or art. I have lived this way since 1968, although I always worked hard and had no money until after The Women’s Room was published, in 1977. Those of us who choose pleasure without money lack the smashing high style of people of wealth, however. This is a loss, but I could not forget that while these women were striding around being brilliant and glamorous, my grandmother was working in a sweatshop and weeping every night for the children taken from her and put in an orphanage. Yet I hate ruining every image of style and ease by puritanical disapproval.
The next book I read served as a serious corrective to this lovely vision of life. Death Without Weeping , by Nancy Scheper-Hughes, describes a town the author calls Bom Jesus, a slum in northeastern Brazil, inhabited by cane cutters recently removed from their land, working wives, and their children. The author, an anthropologist, brought her own children with her on at least one stay in the town. Her motherhood was part of the impetus behind this book, an anatomy of horrible poverty and disease (owing to things like wages too low to feed even one person, much less a family, polluted water, lack of social services), because the author was so horrified at the fact that the mothers of Bom Jesus do not weep when their infants die—as they regularly do.
But what horrified me most in her vivid picture of the lives of these people, what remains with me still, is how their culture succeeded in brainwashing them, even without television. The people are black, and so poor that they are often starving. But they do not know it! They have lost touch with their bodies. Observing the Portuguese who lived in the city, they saw tall, straight-limbed, healthy white people. They concluded that their own problems with diseases they called nervos , gastos , and foma were a consequence of their race. Starving, they went to a doctor , who, although he had to know better, gave them prescriptions for tranquilizers! When their infants cried out of hunger, they gave them sugar water laced with tranquilizers. Of course the babies died.
On Tuesday, September 15, Rob and Gloria accompanied me to my oncologist’s. I had missed my previous monthly checkup because I was in the hospital. Gloria questioned the doctor far more intelligently than I could have; knowing she had telephoned Dr. Kelson, the head of the gastrointestinal department, some weeks before, he treated her warily. (I had not known about this and was privately delighted. Only recently have I discovered that he informed her the average survival time for patients with esophageal cancer was eighteen months—six months longer than my oncologist said. But never, then or later, did she indicate that she had been told this.) The oncologist directed me to have a CT scan to see if the chemo had
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