_ 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'll 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
thinking 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 not sure the unemployed should be grateful
to the serious thinkers for the careful study we
give them. Don't you think so? _