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The Unscratchable Itch
Culture
The Unscratchable Itch
Human nature’s affinity for complaint just won’t go away.
Without complaint, journalists would have no work—and, come to think of it, daily conversation would be much impoverished, if not stopped altogether. We are enjoined to count our blessings, of course, but as La Rochefoucauld pointed out more than three centuries ago, it is easier to give good advice than to take it.
In the contest between complaint and counting one’s blessings, therefore, complaint wins every time. In any case, the bad is more interesting than the good, as many a writer has found. Tolstoy said that every happy family is happy in the same way, while every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way; in similar fashion, every good person is good in the same way, while every bad person is bad in his own way. When you try to describe someone good, you soon fall into cliché, and risk becoming sugary, saccharine, and syrupy. Descriptions of good people soon become almost nauseating or obituary-like. Their sincerity is likely to be doubted.
Where complaint is current—or, in the case of journalists, an actual profession—the first casualty is gratitude. Everything except what is complained of is taken for granted, as if we inhabited the worst of all possible worlds.
Sleepless one night, I tried to think of small, tangible things for whose existence to be grateful and which I normally take for granted.
From time to time, I suffer from—or perhaps I experience would be a more accurate way to put it—an itch on my back when I lie in bed. I cannot account for it; I have no skin disease, and the bedclothes are perfectly clean. It comes purely by chance; its arrival one of the minor mysteries of the universe.
It is strange how so slight a thing as an itching in the back can preoccupy one. It drives the Critique of Pure Reason quite out of one’s mind. I think it was Hume who said that a toothache was enough to destroy any philosophy, and what is a slight itch on the back compared to a toothache?
You think it will go by itself. After all, if it can come for no reason, it can go for no reason: but that, alas, is not the way of slight itches on the back in bed, at least in my experience of them. You can try to ignore them, as in the tropics you can try to ignore the whining of a mosquito in your ear: but it can’t be done. With regard to the mosquito, you end up slapping yourself on the side of your face, whereupon the cunning mosquito stops for a while. You assume you have squashed it as it (or rather, she) deserved, but the mosquito’s silence is, if I may mix the sensory mode necessary to understand my metaphor, a false dawn. It (or rather she) starts up again, and you can slap yourself black and blue without having put an end to her nagging.
Now, my experience of little itches on my back is not unique. In fact I think it must be quite common: I know this because one day, my wife, tiring of being asked to scratch my back just for a few moments—a bit higher! a bit lower! a bit to the middle! a bit to the side! It’s amazing just how precise and at the same time evasive the location of a little itch can be—found me a backscratcher for the very purpose of scratching my back myself.
In fact, she found me two backscratchers, of rather different design. The first had a shoehorn at one end, attached rigidly to a moulded piece of metal like a clawed hand at the other. The backscratcher element of this interesting double-purpose instrument was not very convenient, because the length of the handle between it and the shoehorn was too long. It was all right if the itch was at the base of your back, but much less use if it were further up your back, to say nothing were it on the top of your shoulder. Nevertheless, an interesting question arose in my mind: Who was the person who first thought of combining a shoehorn with a backscratcher? No such idea ever had, or ever would have, occurred to me. It was admirable in its originality.
Furthermore, the person who first thought of it would, I assume, have had to persuade someone else, some company, that his idea was worth putting into practice. He might have had to win over a whole board of directors, skeptical or outright dismissive of his idea; he would have to have done market research; and then all kinds of engineers, designers, marketers, accountants, and so forth would have been involved before the final product became available.
The second backscratcher that my wife bought me was a great improvement on this model. It was quite elegant as well. It had an extendable and adjustable piece of metal, very well made, such that what might be called the business end of the instrument could reach any area of my back, from the base of my back to the top of my shoulder. Moreover, it had a pleasing, slightly roughened green handle by which to hold it.
A great deal of thought must have gone into designing, producing and marketing it. No doubt it was made in China, as everything is these days, but that does not alter the fact that it was, and is, an impressive instrument. It brings itches to a halt before they really get going. It has added to my personal autonomy.
Of course, scratching another person’s back can be an act of devotion, though in the literary world it means writing a good review of someone’s book in the hope and expectation that he will return the compliment. (I have never been guilty of such a thing, I hasten to add, though I have reviewed perhaps 500 books or more.)
So when the other day I could not sleep and felt a little itch on my back, my wife being asleep, I quietly slid open the drawer of my bedside table and took out my backscratcher, adjusted it to the right length, and was very grateful to all the people who had gone into making it.
We should bear gratitude in mind more often. We won’t, though: that is my complaint against human nature.
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