Knoxville daily chronicle. [volume] (Knoxville, Tenn.) 1870-1882, 1881-08-07
Our Pleasures.

The man who said that life would be
tolerable but for its pleasures hit the gold,
if not quite the bulls eye. For after g GER
tain age our pleasures are the next worst
things to our pains, and sometimes even 60
beyond these in the amount of suffering
which they entail. But being pleasures no
one must make moan or bid for COM
passion, and all must pretend that they are
vastly entertained and highly gratiied by
the foxes which have to be nursed by pet
dogs, and the burdens which have to be
carried gally like ornaments. And herein
lies the sting of our pleasures. In sorrow
we can call to our aid the dignity of philoso-
ply, the patience of resi- gnation; and we
have, besides, the sympathy and the sooth-
ing touch of pity. In pain, if we have the
nerve, we can make ourselves strong to
bear and keep a stoical kind of silence
But it is hard to wear mask of enjoyment
, when we are in profound suffering, and to
make as if our scourge of knotted rope gave
us only delicate and delicious sensation of
delight. Were we to torture our criminals
as we torture Ourselves-say in the full
swing of a London season-the whole civil
lied world would be aghast at our inhuman-
ity. Were we to rob thieves of their rest,
make burglars sick and i'll by forcing them
to breathe for hours vitiated atmosphere
highly charged with carbonic acid gas and
fetid germs of disease, submit pick-pockets
to that incessant modification of sef-re-
spect, to that doom of Tantalus and that
labor in vain of Sisyphns- voluntarily under
gone by those of us who have social ambi-
ton in excess of orr credentials-were we
to damage the health, weaken the mind,
stunt the intelligence, weaken the nerves and
hpaaR tho fJt,, xf fol
misdemeanists, We should be held more
cruel than the old inquisitor and more insen-
safe than the witch finder. But all these
things we do ourselves, under the
disguise of pleasure and the pretense
of enjoyment And we know
the cheat, but tacitly agree among ourselves
to uphold it as reality. We go to late
DINNERS where the profusion of food op-
presses us by its superfuousness, as well as
by the length of time it takes to serve, and
the almost unavoidable necessity which it
imposes on us of taking what we know will
disagree with us-where the wine gives us
govt, and the sweets transmute themselves
into SO much acid in our blood: whore we
SIT with vapid doll on the one side and an
irritating bore on the other, and lose our
time IN trying to animate the former and to
repress the latter; where we are LAYING in
headache and nervous debility for the NOR
row-conscious all the time of our suicidal
folly. From dinner we go to one or two
still later evening parties, where the atmos-
phere is yet more vitiated, and the nervous
exhaustion still more intense And
then We lind that the next morning we
cannot do our work with freshness OF
vigor, that our brain power has fallen to
the lowest point, and our irritability and
peevishness have risen to the highest Il
we are parents with young daughters tc
take out, we begin to dress for the ball al
the time when we should be going to bed
Weary and sleepy, we rouse ourselves
with tea or some other stimulant, and hope
to tide over the hours ON this our support
against the claims or natural somnolence
and the desire for rest. The recipe may be
successful, but at what cost For every
nights forced lwakefulness brought ahont
now by such means may be counted two n,
involuntary vlglls when we would give the
world to sleep, and cannot We sit in tbese
heated rooms till or o'clock in the morn
ing, our poor dazed eyes gathering straws
and our heavy heads nodding as the min
ntes lag SO slowly ON their way to hours
while our girls are flirting with handsom
young ineligibles by the open windows O.
the passages, laying the foundations of con
sumption on the right hand, and of misery
or heart break on the left But these bali.
come into the list of our pleasures, fortified
by that OF our duties when we are parents
with manageable daughters whom we have
to place." and the world would set us
down for half insane and wholly selfish il
we refused to give our girls whai