And Now Our Annual Reading

Dr. X posts this from the Take-a-Photo-with-Santa line at the Stanford Mall:

"Well, it's that time of year again, time to open up Max Beerbohm's inspired A Christmas Garland, the book in which he offers Christmas wishes in the style of most of his leading contemporaries, from Kipling to Chesterton.

"So here are a few choice bits from 'The Mote in the Middle Distance' by H*nry J*m*s:

"The mote in the middle distance?" he asked. "Did you ever, my dear,
know me to see anything else? I tell you it blocks out everything.
It's a cathedral, it's a herd of elephants, it's the whole habitable
globe. Oh, it's, believe me, of an obsessiveness!" But his sense of
the one thing it didn't block out from his purview enabled him
to launch at Eva a speculation as to just how far Santa Claus had,
for the particular occasion, gone. The gauge, for both of them,
of this seasonable distance seemed almost blatantly suspended in
the silhouettes of the two stockings. Over and above the basis of
(presumably) sweetmeats in the toes and heels, certain extrusions
stood for a very plenary fulfilment of desire. And, since Eva had set
her heart on a doll of ample proportions and practicable eyelids--had
asked that most admirable of her sex, their mother, for it with not
less directness than he himself had put into his demand for a sword
and helmet--her coyness now struck Keith as lying near to, at indeed
a hardly measurable distance from, the border-line of his patience. If
she didn't want the doll, why the deuce had she made such a point of
getting it? He was perhaps on the verge of putting this question to
her, when, waving her hand to include both stockings, she said "Of
course, my dear, you _do_ see. There they are, and you know I know
you know we wouldn't, either of us, dip a finger into them." With a
vibrancy of tone that seemed to bring her voice quite close to him,
"One doesn't," she added, "violate the shrine--pick the pearl from the
shell!"

Even had the answering question "Doesn't one just?" which for an
instant hovered on the tip of his tongue, been uttered, it could not
have obscured for Keith the change which her magnificence had wrought
in him. Something, perhaps, of the bigotry of the convert was already
discernible in the way that, averting his eyes, he said "One doesn't
even peer." As to whether, in the years that have elapsed since he
said this either of our friends (now adult) has, in fact, "peered," is
a question which, whenever I call at the house, I am tempted to put
to one or other of them. But any regret I may feel in my invariable
failure to "come up to the scratch" of yielding to this temptation is
balanced, for me, by my impression--my sometimes all but throned and
anointed certainty--that the answer, if vouchsafed, would be in the
negative.


"Project Gutenberg has put up the full text of A Christmas Garland here."