Certainly not the first rude question

It is of course rude to ask what goes into our standard picture of domestic felicity. But there is a standard picture of domestic felicity. Some rules govern those ingredients as the picture appears much the same everywhere. I have before me a straightforward example, a couple sitting at a breakfast table by a wall that is entirely window, lit gray-ly from what looks like an overcast morning outside their—possibly hillside house. Beneath the table a young boy is playing upon a carpet patterned in vaguely Mugghal or east indian designs, whorled and angled in aqua, turquoise and lime green. The room is predictably roomlike, square, spare, measured, at the wall opposite the window a neo-60s sideboard with straight hewn legs, rounded corners and recessed drawer handles, on top cascading ferns from spherical wooden vases. It is morning. The couple, whose features and coloring possibly move the setting to a place of diverse population, smile at one another, she looking attentively at him while holding a coffee cup. She: silky brown hair, cherub-soft, striped slacks, her bare foot coquetting with the floor. He: slender, lightly bearded, thotughtful, expressing an idea. She is looking at him while his gaze goes just over her shoulder and out to the gray hillscape behind her, where his thoughts combinate together. There is also of course a cute dog, down there with the boy. There is not in this scene, or in any portrait of domestic felicity I have known: dirty ash trays, stacks of dishes, shelves full of books set aside to finish later, bales of magazines deposited randomly about the premises, piles of clean clothing by the drier, piles of dirty clothing by the washer, a light dust of soot along the sills, clumps of dog hair on the carpet, an array of coffee mugs ornamenting surfaces, cobwebs, dustwebs, window smears, and crumb clusters. The people are attractive, the room is attractive.

Pain

Tell you it’s real nice boppin along with no pain and feeling that you’ve never had a bad day in your life and never will have. Then suddenly you have pain. By pain I mean not the kind that animates the sensory nerves and sends a jangling along the pathways to register as fire in the brain. The pain I speak of has no fire, no jangling. It is the stunned silence after a bomb blast, the clear-cutting of perception which the migraine would otherwise occupy, the wide absence of tiny understandings. It is mortal pain without the histrionics, agony without writhing. It is dumb, it is dumpf.