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A curious vertigo afflicts the mind of the house-hunter. In the first
place, it is sufficiently maddening to see the settled homes of other
happier souls, all apparently so firmly rooted in a warm soil of
contentment while he floats, an unhappy sea-urchin, in an ocean of
indecision. Furthermore, how confusing (to one who likes to feel himself
somewhat securely established in a familiar spot) the startling panorama
of possible places in which he visualizes himself. One day it is Great
Neck, the next it is Nutley; one day Hollis, the next Englewood; one
day Bronxville, and then Garden City. As the telephone rings, or the
suasive accents of friendly realtors expound the joys and glories of
various regions, his uneasy imagination flits hoppingly about the
compass, conceiving his now vanished household goods reassembled and
implanted in these contrasting scenes.
Startling scenarios are filmed in his reeling mind while he listens,
over the tinkling wire, to the enumeration of rooms, baths, pantries,
mortgages, commuting schedules, commodious closets, open fireplaces, and
what not. In the flash and coruscation of thought he has transported his
helpless family to Yonkers, or to Manhasset, or to Forest Hills, or
wherever it may be, and tries to focus and clarify his vision of what it
would all be like. He sees himself (in a momentary close-up) commuting
on the bland and persevering Erie, or hastening hotly for a Liberty
Street ferry, or changing at Jamaica (that mystic ritual of the Long
Island brotherhood). For an instant he is settled again, with a modest
hearth to return to at dusk ... and then the sorrowful compliment is
paid him and he wonders how the impression got abroad that he is a
millionaire.
There is one consoling aspect of his perplexity, however, and that is
the friendly intercourse he has with high-spirited envoys who represent
real estate firms and take him voyaging to see "properties" in the
country. For these amiable souls he expresses his candid admiration.
Just as when one contemplates the existence of the doctors one knows,
one can never imagine them ill, so one cannot conceive of the friendly
realtor as in any wise distressed or grieved by the problems of the
home. There is something Olympian about them, happy creatures! They deal
only in severely "restricted" tracts. They have a stalwart and serene
optimism. Odd as it seems, one of these friends told us that some people
are so malign as to waste the time of real estate men by going out to
look at houses in the country without the slightest intention of
"acting." As a kind of amusement, indeed! A harmless way of passing an
afternoon, of getting perhaps a free motor ride and enjoying the novelty
of seeing what other people's houses look like inside. But our friend
was convinced of one humble inquirer's passionate sincerity when he saw
him gayly tread the ice floes of rustic Long Island in these days of
slush and slither.
How do these friends of ours, who see humanity in its most painful and
distressing gesture (i.e., when it is making up its mind to part with
some money), manage to retain their fine serenity and blitheness of
spirit? They have to contemplate all the pathetic struggles of
mortality, for what is more pathetic than the spectacle of a man trying
to convince a real estate agent that he is not really a wealthy creature
masking millions behind an eccentric pose of humility? Our genial
adviser Grenville Kleiser, who has been showering his works upon us,
has classified all possible mental defects as follows:
(_a_) _Too easy acquiescence_
(_b_) _A mental attitude of contradiction_
(_c_) _Undue skepticism_
(_d_) _A dogmatic spirit_
(_e_) _Lack of firmness of mind_
(_f_) _A tendency to take extreme views_
(_g_) _Love of novelty; that is, of what is foreign, ancient,
unusual, or mysterious._
All these serious weaknesses of judgment may be discerned, in rapid
rotation, in the mind of the house-hunter. It would be only natural, we
think, if the real estate man were to tell him to go away and study Mr.
Kleiser's "How to Build Mental Power." In the meantime, the vision of
the home he had dreamed of becomes fainter and fainter in the seeker's
mind--like the air of a popular song he has heard whistled about the
streets, but does not know well enough to reproduce. How he envies the
light-hearted robins, whose house-hunting consists merely in a gay
flitting from twig to twig. Yet, even in his disturbance and nostalgia
of spirit, he comforts himself with the common consolation of his
cronies--"Oh, well, one always finds something"--and thus (in the words
of good Sir Thomas Browne) teaches his haggard and unreclaimed reason to
stoop unto the lure of Faith.