Woman

by Anthony M. Ludovici

The principal characteristic of the healthy child is, that it does not play with its primary appetites; it does not laugh about them; it cannot abide a joke about them. Watch a healthy child eat! It is absolutely serious, absorbed, concentrated, intent! A very healthy boy will even frown over his meal, just as he will frown when he eats a piece of chocolate. It is obvious from his expression that eating is no joke with him. It is one of the gravest, most pressing, most engrossing interests in life. And the same holds good of all healthy, positive adults. Watch a healthy and positive adult at his meals; he is serious to a fault! It is only when the demands of his body have been satisfied that he begins to indulge in levity. The man who habitually jokes at the beginning of a meal is past salvation. He is negative by nature and cannot be rescued.

Seriousness towards the primary instinct of self-preservation is one of the principal characteristics of the healthy child. But the healthy child is not yet fully, consciously concerned about any other instinct; if it were—if, for instance, it were fully conscious of the reproductive instinct—we may be quite sure that it would take it quite seriously too; for it is serious—most serious perhaps—even when it is playing.

In spite of all the apparent light-heartedness of the healthy child, which is all that superficial people can see in it; in spite of the ease with which it turns from sleep to wakefulness, from tears to laughter, and vice versâ, there is a profundity, a sobriety, a solidity about its seriousness that nothing can affect. It takes its own body, itself, the world, and life tremendously seriously. It takes its wants and its desires seriously. It takes its loves and its hates seriously. Little children can be homicidal in their loathing of other children; they can be heroic in their devotion. Those who always depict children with a smile on their chubby faces, and hopping about on one leg, know nothing about them. They know nothing of the imperturbable gravity of the child, and of positiveness generally.

To watch the face of an elderly, negative spinster when a really healthy boy loses his temper, is to witness in one human countenance the whole history of the long conflict between those vultures of which I have spoken and the artless yea-sayer to Life.

Later on, if he is carefully handled, this boy will take his love seriously; he will cling to the girl he chooses in a manner that will make that same spinster marvel at his determination, and he will be as fierce and as serious in his desire for the woman of his choice as he once was over his games, over his hates, and over his meals.

Laughter is not nearly such a common characteristic of healthy positive life as the superficial imagine—more particularly noisy laughter. In every mixed party where much loud laughter or shrill laughter is heard, there is sure to be a good deal, not of gaiety, not of wanton spirits, but of nervous irascibility, sexual excitation, and particularly sexual abstinence, exasperation and—negativeness! He who travels the world over ascertains this curious fact: that loud, shrill laughter is essentially the social noise of Puritanical countries.

Positive people take too serious an attitude to life, to themselves, to each other, and particularly to members of the opposite sex, constantly to vent what they feel in an idle cackle or giggle. They laugh, but their hilarity is short, violent, and apparently effective; because it seems to relieve them for longer periods than does the laughter of negative people.

One of the chief characteristics of the positive mind, then, is the gravity, the solemn interest, with which it confronts life itself, the body that holds it, and everything vital, including sex.

Behold the healthy child, and you have an automaton guided absolutely by a positive mind! To retain this positive mind throughout one’s youth and adulthood is the greatest triumph—particularly nowadays—that anyone can achieve. He who achieves it may well laugh; he has a right to laugh; for he has mastered the most redoubtable foe a man can encounter—the powerful false values that are now seeking to prevail everywhere, and over the victims of which the vultures are muttering their thanksgiving.

The only positive form of laughter is the expression of a consciousness of acquired power. This is Hobbes’ view, it was Stendhal’s view; it is the biologist’s view, who says that laughter is the expression of superior adaptation.