Life, 1916-07-20 · page 20 of 44
Life — July 20, 1916 — page 20: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This page contains two distinct elements: **The Small Cartoon (bottom left):** A satirical sketch of class pretension. A haughty gentleman ignores a waiter's question about soup ("sour, six?"), instead slowly removing his gloves in an affected manner. When finally answering, he pompously corrects the waiter—it's "oxtail," not soup. The joke mocks upper-class affectation and the gentleman's condescending treatment of working-class service staff. **The Essays:** The page features two philosophical pieces: "Vision" (poetry about city children and May) and "Nonsense" (an essay praising nonsense as superior to seriousness, citing *Alice in Wonderland* and *Don Quixote* as examples of wisdom). The final anecdote—a New Yorker claiming to have been "held up twice in Arizona"—exemplifies the absurdist humor being celebrated: an absurd boast that deflates Eastern pretension through Western exaggeration. The page overall champions irrationality and humor as antidotes to stifling convention.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
108 Vision I MUST remark the cowslips bend As tho’ from flying feet, When over all the hills and vales The breath of May is sweet. And so I wonder if, unseen, Thro’ every sunny day Athwart their golden loveliness The city children play. Leolyn Louise Everett. Nonsense W E have always been interested in Nonsense as a fine art since the day, long time removed, when we read how Adam named the animals while sitting near the village pump in Main Street, Eden. For Nonsense is a look- ing-glass wherein Reason sees the re- verse of its own prim patterns. It is a sort of fantastic Bagdad of which Reality is only a mirage. Nonsense is a storehouse of wisdom. There is probably more in “ Alice in Wonderland” than there is in the lamentations of Solomon. And the final apotheosis of Nonsense is found in Don Quixote, for in that vast pano- rama of the world everything is ridi- culed except the Spirit of the Absurd itself, which is the cornerstone of all Waiter: s Haughty Gentleman ignores waiter and slowly removes his gloves. Waiter (impatiently): sour, six? Haughty Gentleman (angrily): 1s 1 “NO, SIR; OXTAIL.” CAMPING OUT human action and the unquenchable glint in the eye of Cervantes. rything may go out of fashion— marriage, work, clothes, gods, pacifists and Peace Arks—but Nonsense will persist until the end. It is the one im- mortal god. Seriousness is the King of Terrors, and he slays more than lobsters or unpreparedness. We need more Nonsense in the world. We need a completer under- standing of the laws of the Absurd. We should give a more insistent Yea to that persistent tomfoolery and waggery that seem to be not only the pastime of the gods themselves but their very raison d’étre. Not truth but Nonsense shall set us free. Benjamin de Casseres. “YOU have never been in New York before, have you?” “No. But I've been held up twice in Arizona.” comicbooks.com