If, on the other hand, you don’t give a tuppeny toss about
prosperity, but simply want enough to follow your heart, you don’t go onto any
pecking order. And then there’s nobody above you.
Saturday 10 August 2013
Striving for Subservience.
It struck me the other day (when a very rich person drove
past me on the lane in a very expensive car and declined to return my
acknowledgement) that there are millions of people constantly striving to be
more prosperous, and all they’re doing is trying to climb a little bit further
up the social pecking order. And such an aspiration means that unless they happen
to become one of those ultra-mega-rich multi-billionaires, they’re always going
to have somebody looking down on them.
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4 comments:
Maddie and I have decided that you belong to class X. See below from Paul Fussell's book 'Class'
The upper class, which consists of the top-out-of-sights and the mainstream upper class (just called the uppers from here on out).
The middle class, broken down into upper-middles and middles.
The proletarian, or working class (proles, for short), consisting of the high, middle, and low proles.
The very bottom classes, the destitute and the bottom-out-of-sight.
Category X, people who withdraw from the class system and live life according to their own rules. (Category X has nothing to do with Generation X.
n.
Eccentric, you mean?
Seriously, though, thank you N&M. I'll take that as a compliment (maybe misguidedly, but that's my choice.)
Tell you what's funny, though. A woman from the village - and a fairly well off woman, to boot - said to me recently:
'You're not a peasant. You're not. You're too intelligent.'
Isn't that a hoot?
We would never throw any stones at you from our glass house of eccentricity. (Visiting Ralph the Sheep every weekend, veering off the road for old graveyards etc.)
It sounds like the woman from the village was trying to place you in a social level (out loud!? yes that's a hoot) You have certain peasant qualities (by your own account a lack of funds) and some upper class ones, intelligence, writing ability, perhaps your facial features etc., so you "don't go onto any pecking order."
When I went to the village hall to pay my taxes a few years ago, the woman behind the counter remarked that she hadn't seen Maddie recently. When I told her she was studying at Oxford she remarked (heavy NY accent) "You must wonder where that intelligence came from".
n.
It's interesting, though, isn't it, that for most of British history since the Middle Ages, a person didn't have to be intelligent to go to Oxford, but simply born into the right class. Hence the notion was solidly ingrained that the upper classes were more intelligent than the lower ones. It took the centre-left reconstruction post WWII to turn that one fully around.
I like your woman from the village hall - sounds like a true American diplomat!
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