Life, 1900-12-01 · page 15 of 44
Life — December 1, 1900 — page 15: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This two-panel illustration depicts a moral allegory about the dangers of distraction and temptation. The left panel ("SEEING") shows a man in a forest pursuing a beautiful woman's vision while his guide urges him forward—he's so entranced that he fails to notice he's running toward a cliff edge. The right panel ("FEELING") reveals the fall's consequences: the man experiences vivid, confused hallucinations of all previous visions before crashing back to reality. The joke's punchline is the deflation: the dramatic supernatural descent turns out to be a man named Harkins simply falling out of his chair during a nap in his shabby boardinghouse room, startling his landlady and disturbing the downstairs tenant. The satire mocks both romantic idealism (the pursuit of illusory beauty) and the grandiose inner lives people construct—here reduced to a mundane domestic embarrassment. It's early-20th-century *Life* magazine humor: satirizing human pretension through contrasting romantic fantasy with unglamorous reality.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
SEEING. They entered aforest. Suddenly the vision of a woman seemed to form itself inthe air, The face was one of marvelous beauty. She looked at him smilingly, He advanced towards her, but as he did so sho retreated. He was running now, faster and faster, He looked only into the vision's eyes, not noticing whoro he was going. his guide urging him on, Hoe almost bad her now—when —ho found himself on tho edge of a yawning pit, too late to recover his balance, As he stumbled over he heard a rippling laugh, and the voice of bis guide saying tor—" “Now prepare PEELING, Ho felt himself going down, down Into illimitable space, All tho visions ho had seen passed beforo his eyes, but in awful con- fusion, Tho last was that of the siren, and again sho scemed to beckon him. Ho put out his hand to touch her. Thero was a roar, a terrifle crash—a blank—a bright light shining in his eyos —a shabbily appointed boarding-house room, an overturned chair, an ovening papor on the floor beside him, and—bis fat old landlady, who had onterod to scold Mr. Harkins for taking cat- naps in his chatr and then falling out of it and disturbing the star boarder in the room beneath,