A Question
2 Minutes Read Time
Maybe it’s wrong to be a person who can be made happy
by a lamp. This is an old notebook, from spring 2011,
but I know exactly which lamp I had in mind.
The question has haunted me for some time.
If you’re this sort of person, your mind will fly past wrong,
even ignore happy, to get to the lamp. What kind of lamp
has that power? Surely it must be costly, or rare, or treasured
by a family through generations. But this lamp was found
on a sidewalk in the Western Addition, San Francisco, in 1991
for ten dollars, with its twin. Rectangular, the body is emerald
porcelain with crackled glaze; its fittings are bronze, and its light
glows in three strengths through a cream silk shade.
Do you begin to see what I mean? And if so, does your
understanding lead you toward happy or toward wrong?
If you’re going to be made happy by a lamp, that’s that.
Nothing will stop you: not nine years of self-reflection,
not even the persistence of the question. Yet it seems,
to a person happy in this way, that you must try not to
marry the sort of person whose mind a lamp leads toward wrong.
Read more from Issue 18.2.
