In Praise of Luxuries > IDEAS & IDEALS

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The unusually hot summer of this year was not so unbearable for me as it ought to be, owing entirely to the air-conditioner at my apartment. Whenever I felt uncomfortable and uneasy with the high temperature, humidity and sweat, I pushed a small button on the wall, and then a bout of cool breeze swept down on me from above and cooled the entire living room instantly to the point of freezing. Relaxing myself on the sofa in the balmy wind, I felt as if I were in the garden of Eden.

     Up until last summer I had done without it. I thought I could not afford it. When my wife suggested the idea of buying one, I knew she did not mean it. The two electric fans were the luxuries for us, and were doing their job well enough. And I knew she was the last person on the earth to take the initiative in buying a luxury like the air-conditioner. If I had suggested the idea first, she surely would have rejected it.

     But one day early this summer, long before the killing heat-wave had set in, she said casually she had ordered an air-conditioner. It soon arrived, wrapped in two large cartons, followed by two mechanics. They fixed one part on the wall and put another out on the verandah. It was a new model, they said, with the motor separate from the cooler so that the noise was effectively eliminated. It simply was a luxury we had never thought to buy so easily with so little hesitation.

     For the first few days we felt uncomfortable and uneasy with the unaccustomed comfort and ease we came to enjoy unprepared, and even guilty for being too luxurious. There was unexpressed fear for the electric bill coming next month. Somebody in the family turned it off as soon as I turned it on, and vice versa. The interval lengthened as time wore on. Soon no one in the family cared to turn it off at all. The machine was supposed to be on all the time. We came to feel so free and familiar with the new luxury in a few days.

     Now summer is almost over, and no one in my family regards it as a luxury. It has already lost all of its glory and attraction and has become one of the many items in the house that help make our life more comfortable and efficient, elegant and graceful. It is not a luxury any more than the telephone, the refrigerator, or the color TV set is. All the material luxuries cease to be a luxury the moment we own them. They become necessities. Aye, there is the rub.

     Once a luxury becomes a necessity, we cannot do without it. There is no turning back from the taste of it. The taste drives away all those plausible excuses and noble self-justifications for the life without it. Like a man before the temptation of a new vice or sin, we confront it with curiosity, scorn, envy or hate, and we first endure, resist, and finally embrace it.

     There are some thinkers, and spiritual leaders in our society who maintain that luxuries -- the comforts of life -- are not only dispensable, but positive hindrance to the elevation of mankind. These people are either very ignorant of what they are talking about, or they are already leading a much more luxurious life than they think they are. Every state of society, primitive or advanced, is as much luxurious as it can be. The history of mankind can also be defined as the history of human efforts to produce and possess more luxuries. While the river of civilization has flown red with the blood of human strifes and wars, people on both sides of the bank have built better houses, made more refined potteries, woven finer clothes , and worked on faster and more elegant carriages.

     Critics of luxuries are also very luxurious people in their own way. Usually they are more intelligent, intellectual, and consequently arrogant and inevitably lazy. They are also very proud and extremely patient. They never envy or covet other man's new car, nor my air-conditioner. They would rather walk more and be less mobile in safety than bother to drive themselves in danger. In a well air-conditioned classroom they like to lecture on the harm that can be caused by the air-conditioner. They often lament over the pollution of air in a taxi. They complain of the material progress in a Boeing 747 jet airliner. They are usually more concerned with the bigger problems of mankind than with the individual's comfort.

     Resistance to luxuries, however, is momentary and ultimately futile. Luxuries of yesterday have become today's necessities. For most of us today life without a refrigerator is almost impossible to think of. I have never dreamed, up until last year, that I would ever own a car and drive it myself. I cannot think of a summer without the air-conditioner from now on.

     Man is instinctively a very luxurious being. Being luxurious is closely related not only with man's love of comfort, greed and vanity, but also with his deep and strong sense of beauty. Man does not eat only for existence or survival, nor do they wear clothes only for the protection of their bodies from the sun or rain. He also eats for good taste and wears for grace and elegance. Indian women in the Amazon jungles paint their faces and wear ear-rings as the women walking the streets of Champs-Elysees in Paris. The fall and decline of Socialism and Communism was inevitable in that they neglected or overlooked the importance of luxuries in human life.
          (September 2, 1990)