Hermione and Her Little Group of Serious Thinkers/The Exotic and the Unemployed
THE EXOTIC AND THE UNEMPLOYED
WE'VE been taking up the Exotic this week—in poetry and painting, you know, and all that sort of thing—and its influence on our civilization.
Really, it's wonderful—simply wonderful! Quite different from the Erotic, you know, and from the Esoteric, too—though they're all mixed up with it sometimes.
Odd, isn't it, how all these new movements seem to be connected with one another?
One of the chief differences between the Exotic in art and other things—such as the Esoteric, for instance—is that nearly everything Exotic seems to have crept into our art from abroad.
Don't you think some of those foreign ideas are apt to be—well, dangerous? That is, to the untrained mind?
You can carry them too far, you know—and if you do they work into your subconsciousness.
One of the girls—she belongs to the same Little Group of Advanced Thinkers that I do—has been so taken with the Exotic that she wears orchids all the time and just simply craves Chinese food. "My love," she said to me only yesterday, "I feel that I must have chop suey or I'll die!" The Exotic has worked into her subliminal being, you know.
She has an intense and passionate nature, and I'm sure I don't know what would become of her if it were not for the spiritual discipline she gets out of modern thought.
Next week we're taking up Syndicalism—it's frightfully interesting, they say, and awfully advanced.
I suppose it's a new kind of philosophy or socialism, or maybe anarchy—or something like that. Most of these new things that come along nowadays are something like that, aren't they?
I'm sure the world owes a debt to its advanced thinkers which it can never repay for always keeping abreast of topics like that.
Not that I've lost my interest in any of the older forms of sociology, you know, just because I am keeping up with the newer phases of it.
Only yesterday I rode about town in the car and had the chauffeur stop a while every place where they were shoveling snow.
The nicest man was with me—he is connected with a settlement, and has given his life to sociology and all that sort of thing.
"Just think," I said to him, "how much real practical sociology we have right here before us—all these men shoveling snow—and how little they realize, most of them, that their work is taking them into sociology at all."
He didn't say anything, but he seemed impressed.
And I'm sure the unemployed should be grateful to the serious thinkers for the careful study we give them. Don't you think so?