Simple Social Graces [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION America is hurting. We are rich in goods but poor in spirit. Public life is splintered, crude, and violent. Too many private lives are a shambles of broken relationships, broken homes, and stressed-out, time-squeezed families. We search frantically for quick fixes to fill a deep internal void that we struggle to describe. The answer lies neither in sixties-style government programs nor fifties nostalgia, and certainly not in accumulating more high-tech toys. To continue buying the constantly recycled versions of these solutions is to invest in damaged goods. Our best hope for finding a more rewarding way of life as individuals and as a country is to reclaim our long lost Victorian sensibilities and what Edith Wharton called "the art of civilized living." We devour the remnants of Victoriana in magazines and period movies because they evoke far more than wistful images of safe, civilized streets, good manners, and stable families. We also hunger for an era when people lived with dignity, instead of just dying with it. We crave the beauty, grace, charm, and passionate romance of the past. What gave this era its mystical aura, that loveliness of life so sorely lacking now? It wasn't simply a question of the proper way to use a fish fork. Consult Emily Post for that; we have bigger fish to fry. Hillary Clinton hinted at the answer in a 1993 New York Times interview. After reading the correspondence of ordinary people from the nineteenth century, she observed: The whole cycle of life and its meaning is tied into their daily life. And you know, by the nature of how we spend our time today, we have walled ourselves off from that. I mean, we get up in the morning and we go to work and our children don't know what our work is, because they don't see us plowing a field or making a quilt. We go off and push papers and then come home and try to explain it. Our relatives age and die often in places far away from our