Summer XVII. Class struggle

Intro & Preface & Contents

Previous: Summer XVI. On the road

I was taking a meal once at a London restaurant -- not one of the great eating-places to which men most resort, but a small establishment on the same model in a quiet neighborhood -- when there entered, and sat down at the next table, a young man of the working class, whose dress betokened holiday. A glance told me that he felt anything but at ease; his mind misgave him as he looked about the long room and at the table before him; and when a waiter came to offer him the card, he stared blankly in sheepish confusion. Some strange windfall, no doubt, had emboldened him to enter for the first time such a place as this, and now that he was here, he heartily wished himself out in the street again. However, aided by the waiter’s suggestions, he gave an order for a beef-steak and vegetables. When the dish was served, the poor fellow simply could not make a start upon it; he was embarrassed by the display of knives and forks, by the arrangement of the dishes, by the sauce bottles and the cruet-stand, above all, no doubt, by the assembly of people not of his class, and the unwonted experience of being waited upon by a man with a long shirt-front. He grew red; he made the clumsiest and most futile efforts to transport the meat to his plate; food was there before him, but, like a very Tantalus, he was forbidden to enjoy it. Observing with all discretion, I at length saw him pull out his pocket handkerchief, spread it on the table, and with a sudden effort, fork the meat off the dish into this receptacle. The waiter, aware by this time of the customer’s difficulty, came up and spoke a word to him. Abashed into anger, the young man roughly asked what he had to pay. It ended in the waiter’s bringing a newspaper, wherein he helped to wrap up meat and vegetables. Money was flung down, and the victim of a mistaken ambition hurriedly departed, to satisfy his hunger amid less unfamiliar surroundings.

It was a striking and unpleasant illustration of social differences. Could such a thing happen in any country but England? I doubt it. The sufferer was of decent appearance, and, with ordinary self-command, might have taken his meal in the restaurant like any one else, quite unnoticed. But he belonged to a class which, among all classes in the world, is distinguished by native clownishness and by unpliability to novel circumstance. The English lower ranks had need be marked by certain peculiar virtues to atone for their deficiencies in other respects.

Alpha.

This could have been a short story but I guess Gissing decided to just use it here instead. I have something to say about the class aspect of this story but I’m going to wait until the next section.

Double height space.

I said previously that the Bank Cafe I frequent is located in a double height space. There is a mezzanine that takes up maybe 20% of the room but the rest is “open to below,” as it says on architectural plans. Normally I would consider this a waste of valuable urban space -- the rent per square foot here must be astounding -- but of course the height does make the space much more expansive and pleasant. But there is an additional advantage. From the ground floor when you look out the ground floor windows you see the bases of the buildings all around and the streets and sidewalks. These are busy sidewalks and handsome buildings, so, if you didn’t have the upper story of windows, you would probably be entirely satisfied with the view. But looking up through the upper windows you can see the tops of some of the more dramatic skyscrapers in the neighborhood, and also the sky and often puffs of fog racing past above or amid the towers. The height of the room, together with the windows, transforms the space from mundane to remarkable.

And here's a postscript: there is actually a "lantern" -- a projection up into the floor above, which is glassed in. You can't go there, but the void above the mezzanine does alter the feel of that space.

Diablo Canyon.

This morning I received an email requesting my help in shutting down the nuclear power plant at Diablo Canyon. Here’s an issue Henry Ryecroft never had to deal with. I studied nuclear reactors in junior high school and even climbed all over the teaching reactor at UCLA (something I'm sure wouldn't be allowed today) and there are also improved reactor designs that eliminate many of the worst case scenarios of the past (and present). But there remains the seemingly unsolvable problem of what to do with the nuclear waste that will remain dangerous for far longer than man has been “civilized.”

So I’m completely against the construction of new power plants, but I’m not sure there is much of a net gain in shutting down existing plants... unless of course they are a present danger. The Diablo Canyon plant sits on top of an earthquake fault on an ocean shore historically subject to tsunamis. So present danger in not much of a reach in this case. Also, the company that runs the plant (PG&E) is known to be irresponsible and dishonest.

I also know someone who works at Diablo Canyon. He isn’t a close friend, just a neighbor of some friends of mine who live in the area. And yet my first thought when I saw the email was that closing the plant would probably mean the end of his job. Then I thought that closing the plant would also mean that the local utility would have to burn more natural gas, so more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and possibly more fracking to get that gas. If it were my decision to make, I would need to ask a lot of questions of people I’m not sure I could entirely trust. The consequences of shutting the plant would be significant, but the consequences of a worst case disaster (like Fukushima) would be so much worse that it would be hard to not opt for the cautious alternative.

The reasonable thing to do would be to require PG&E demonstrate why the plant should not be closed. What I expect, is that there will be some long, drawn out, study of the situation.

Next: Summer XVIII. The English class character.