Summary Of 'On The Art Of Living With Others'
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Answer:
On The Art Of Living With Others"
By Sir Arthur Helps
The "Iliad" for war; the "Odyssey" for wandering; but where is the great domestic epic? Yet it is but commonplace to say that passions may rage round a tea-table which would not have misbecome men dashing at one another in war chariots; and evolutions of patience and temper are performed at the fireside, worthy to be compared with the Retreat of the Ten Thousand. Men have worshipped some fantastic being for living alone in a wilderness; but social martyrdoms place no saints upon the calendar.
We may blind ourselves to it if we like, but the hatreds and disgusts that there are behind friendship, relationship, service, and, indeed, proximity of all kinds, is one of the darkest spots upon earth. The various relations of life, which bring people together, cannot, as we know, be perfectly fulfilled except in a state where there will, perhaps, be no occasion for any of them. It is no harm, however, to endeavor to see whether there are any methods which make these relations in the least degree more harmonious now.
In the first place, if people are to live happily together, they must not fancy, because they are thrown together now, that all their lives have been exactly similar up to the present time, that they started exactly alike, and that they are to be for the future of the same mind. A thorough conviction of the difference of men is the great thing to be assured of in social knowledge: it is to life what Newton's law is to astronomy. Sometimes men have a knowledge of it with regard to the world in general: they do not expect the outer world to agree with them in all points, but are vexed at not being able to drive their own tastes and opinions into those they live with. Diversities distress them. They will not see that there are many forms of virtue and wisdom. Yet we might as well say: "Why all these stars; why this difference; why not all one star?"
Answer:
Italian restaurant in a town in northern New York State has acquired a certain local fame because of its cook, Arnold Deller.
A veteran of World War II, in which he was an army cook in Europe, Deller is fascinated by the art of cooking, and though the special dishes he prepares each week for the restaurant are not elaborate, they are unusual and meticulously researched.
Deller has worked in the restaurant for twenty years.
He is an avid reader, something of a philosopher, and a political idealist.
He has three young daughters, and his son Rinehart has been killed in the Vietnam War.
Finnegan, the narrator, belongs to a teenage motorcycle gang called the Scavengers. Beneath their braggadocio, they are a harmless bunch; their custom is to visit the Italian restaurant in the afternoon to have a beer and listen to Deller hold forth in his eccentric but literate manner while he takes a break from work.
One afternoon, he harangues the boys with his notion of “the art of living.”
Also present are Joe Dellapicallo, the owner’s son, a bartender, and Joe’s daughter Angelina, a cocktail waitress in the restaurant.
Although Joe seems indifferent to, and Angelina coldly irritated by, Deller’s lecture, Finnegan is nonplussed by its intensity. Deller’s argument is that the art of living is the ability to absorb rather than fight foreigners and foreign ways of thinking.
His assumption is that man has always been both a social and a warlike creature.
The need to have and protect children is at the root of this dual aspect of man’s nature, according to Deller.
The social contract has arrived at the point, however, where a man has to accommodate those he once regarded as his.