Life, 1918-01-24 · page 31 of 40
Life — January 24, 1918 — page 31: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
The top illustration satirizes pretentious middle-class aspiration: a well-dressed man enters an ornate building (likely a library or cultural institution), captioned "Be it ever so humble"—ironically inverting the humble-home sentiment from the popular song. The accompanying essay "An Average Man?" mocks the superficially educated person who surrounds himself with unread books and intellectual trappings but lacks genuine learning. He dabbles in poetry, science, and literature without sustained engagement, relying on condensed "Handy Volume" summaries and popular magazines. The satire targets his self-deception: he falls asleep while reading yet believes himself cultured and "keeping in tune with the best literature." The photograph below, labeled "His Blind Side," appears to show a man with a cane, likely illustrating his intellectual or moral blindness—he cannot perceive his own pretension or shallow education. The overall message criticizes early 20th-century middle-class cultural posturing and the gap between the appearance of refinement and actual intellectual substance.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
| fl a a yy / i! “Be it ever so humble An Average Man? E is surrounded by a litter of unabsorbed learning. He possesses an over-supply of books and an under-supply of assimilated information. He desires to he well-read, but lacks the will power for the mental training to enforce systematic and sustained application. He takes a peck at poetry, a squint at Science, a dip into the drama, a bite of biography, a peep at political economy, a frantic gobble at current fiction. He is quite content to range no further afield in letters than the “Handy Volume” compresses, which condenses the life of ger to an illegible inch of italic type, and serve up sliced ps from the illustrious one’s production. Shrouding himself in the pages of the latest popular magazines, he falls asleep mentally and dreams that he is keeping in tune with the best literature of his day. H.M.S. 1S BLIND SIDE comicbooks.com