"THE JOYS OF BEING A WOMAN" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kirkland Winifred)

laughing, how all our life is gilded with fun. Then
off we fly to write it, with the spell still upon us!
The poising of a word on the tip of our pen until the
very most genial sunbeam of all shall touch it, the
weaving the thread of a golden thought in and out
through all the quips and nonsense, the wrapping a
whole life experience in the hollow shaft of some
light-barbed phrase! The best quality of the humorous
essay is that the reader shall smile, not laugh, and,
moreover, that he shall remember no one passage at
which he smiles: it is far better that he should feel
that he has touched a personality tipped with mirth.
Ariel never laughed. The fun that makes the soul
expand must have in it the lift of wings and the
glimpsing fantasy of flight.
More than any other of the shapes prose takes, the
essay should give the reader a sense of
good-fellowship. Probably the writer who as an actual
man is shyest, gives this com-radeship best. The
shy man sheds forth his personality most opulently in
print, and preferably, as certain wise editors have
perceived, in anonymous print. One is sensitive to
having an everyday friend see one's soul in public,
because the everyday friend knows too well the everyday
self, to which the elusive essay-self is too often a

stranger.
That skittish elfin Ego, so alien to the humdrum
man or woman who bears our mortal name, if he only came
to visit us oftener, stayed with us longer, what essays
we might write! A snatch of song, a tinkle of
laughter, a flutter of wings, if he would only linger
until I could clearly see what he is, this Ego of mine,
who tells such happy secrets! Poor babykin, poor
fairykin--that Ego sent forth with us to make blithe
the voyage, we cannot go a-dancing with him out to
fairy fields, because our feet are heavy with Other
People's clogs and fetters, we cannot hear when he
would whisper at our ear gentle philosophies--our own
Self's and no one's else, because of the grave grubby
Book-people who thunder at us from our shelves.
Sometimes I catch him casting a waggish twinkle at me
over the very shoulder of my blackest worry, rainbow
wings and head that is devil-may-care trying to get at
me from behind her sable-stoled form. Even in
the thought of death I catch his cherub chuckle, "Could
a grave hold me?" For is not death also a bugbear of
Other People, not at all of my own Self's making?
Gay little voyager! He seems, when he visits me,
to be the prince of the kingdom of fun. He does not
stay long, but long enough sometimes for me to write an

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