For richer..or poorer? – part 1

I’ve been reading Brideshead Revisited (Evelyn Waugh) these last couple of days. The overarching theme of the book, I guess is about social classes. The main protagonist, Charles Ryder is a middle-class student in Oxford University in the 1920s. He befriended Sebastian Flyte, a captivating L’Enfant terrible from privileged pedigree. As their friendship blossomed, Charles learned more about the decadent and outrageous life of the old-money. As an outsider, first he approaches the subject with wild-eyed bewilderment. I suspect he will be disenchanted by it as well (haven’t finished the book yet).

One passage in the book strikes me immensely. It’s a conversation between Charles and Lady Marchmain – Sebastian’s mother:

I remember [Lady Marchmain] saying “When I was a girl we were comparatively poor, but still much richer than most of the world, and when I married I became very rich. It used to worry me, and I thought it wrong to have so many beautiful things when others had nothing. Now I realize that it is possible for the rich to sin by coveting the privileges of the poor. The poor have always been the favorites of God and his saints but I believe that it is one of the special achievements of Grace to sanctify the whole of life, riches included.

WHOA.

It reminds me of a very memorable passage from The Elegance of A Hedgehog (Murriel Barberry). This book is also about the anthropological aspect of social classes, particularly the rich and the poor. I find it very insightful as it offers two different point of view: how the rich sees the poor, and how the poor sees the rich.

The passage I was mentioning is from the point of view of Renee, a building concierge on affluent apartment in Paris. She’s talking about Colombe Josse, one of the residents in the apartment:

Colombe Josse is…a sort of tall blond leek who dresses like a penniless Bohemian. If there is one thing I despise, it’s the perverse affectation of rich people who go around dressing as if they were poor…. Not only is it ugly, it is also insulting: nothing is more despicable than a rich man’s scorn for a poor man’s longing.

WHOA WHOA.

Well, these passages are basically talking about the same phenomenon: rich people envy poor people. How outrageous….or is it?

From materialistic point of view (and as Madonna said: we are living in a material world), the definition of ‘being rich’ would be ‘having all your needs and wants fulfilled’ – from your basic needs to your frivolous wants. I think the word ‘rich’ even has the connotation of excess. While on the other hand, ‘poor’ is about deprivation – about being denied your needs and wants. So in any sense, it should be the poor who envy the rich. It is despicably greed if it’s otherwise: how can someone who has ‘everything’ still envy others who have ‘nothing’?

Well:

1. Money can’t buy you love. (The Beatles said it. Your arguments are not valid)
2. Here’s another form of truism that none of us can deny : It’s human nature to always want more, more and more. Greed is the natural disposition of human being. Corollary: being rich does not equal an absence of want. It doesn’t make rich people exempt to the agony of wanting what they cannot attain.

Does it make her envy acceptable?

See, there are levels of needs/wants. If your basic needs are fulfilled, then your struggle becomes about your emotional needs, etc. People will continuously invent needs/wants in their life – we are insatiable. For Lady Marchmain, as her worldly needs are lavishly fulfilled, her struggles becomes an immaterial one: the afterlife. What she wants is the assurance that she can continue to live pleasantly in afterlife as she does in the world.

This, I think, is more difficult to attain than bread and butter, right?

Does it make her struggle more agonizing?

Isn’t it better to want things that can be achieved rather than wanting things that are simply beyond our control as humans?

WHOA WHOA WHOA….

*whispers*

Isn’t it actually “better” to be poor than to be rich?

?

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