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“First, the item must demonstrate superior quality. Second, it must be truly unique and difficult to acquire. Third, it must enhance one’s status. And fourth, it must brighten one’s self-image, making the buyer feel special.”
According to Milton Pedraza, head of The Luxury Institute, a consultant group that tracks habits of the wealthiest 10% in America, a luxury product has “four pillars.” To me, it seems like these ‘pillars’ are best found in God; Rosemarie Ward, “The Four Facets of Chic,” pp. 13-14, Intelligent Life: New Trends for Smart Living (Summer 2005), 14.
Ask not (’tis forbidden knowledge), what our destined term of years,
Mine and yours; nor scan the tables of your Babylonish seers.
Better far to bear the future, my Leuconoe, like the past,
Whether Jove has many winters yet to give, or this our last;
This, that makes the Tyrrhene billows spend their strength against the shore.
Strain your wine and prove your wisdom; life is short; should hope be more?
In the moment of our talking, envious time has ebb’d away.
Seize the present; trust to-morrow e’en as little as you may.
Horace, Odes, I.11, Translated by John Conington.
“Hell is an endless holiday – the everlasting state of having nothing to do and plenty of money to spend on doing it.”
Richard Winter, Still Bored in a Culture of Entertainment: Rediscovering Passion and Wonder (Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 2002), 36, citing Orrin Edgar Klapp, Overload and Boredom: Essays on the Quality of Life in the Information Society (New York: Greenwood, 1986), 40.
“Fashion works in a subtle, deceitful way, it gets into everything without us realizing it.”
Nicholas Roeg, Director of The Man Who Fell to Earth (starring David Bowie); “Loving the Alien,” Fashion Rocks, supplement to Details Magazine (September 2007).
“We use a most unfortunate idiom when we say, of a lustful man prowling the streets, that he ‘wants a woman.’ Strictly speaking, a woman is just what he does not want. He wants a pleasure for which a woman happens to be the necessary piece of apparatus. How much he cares about the woman as such may be gauged by his attitude five minutes after fruition (one does not keep the carton after one has smoked the cigarettes).”
C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves (New York: HBJ, 1960), 134-5.
“Sinuously winding through the room
On smokey tongues of sweetened cigarettes, -
Plaintive yet proud the cello tones resume
The andante of smooth hopes and lost regrets.”
Hart Crane, “Carmen de Boheme”
“You will be surprised and I expect, not a little amused to hear that my views at present are getting almost monastic about all the lusts of the flesh. They seem to me to extend the dominion of matter over us: and, out here, where I see spirit continually dodging matter (shells, bullets, animal fears, animal pains) I have formulated my equation Matter = Nature = Satan. And on the other side Beauty, the only spiritual & not-natural thing that I have yet found.”
Walter Hooper, ed., The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis: Family Letters 1905-1931 (San Francisco: Harper, 2004), 371; written to his friend, Arthur Greeves, dated 23 May, 1918.
“Where is my old father? Let him come near. And Pentheus, my son, where is he? Let him bring a strong step-ladder and set it against the house, so that he can nail to the triglyphs this lion’s head I have brought from the hunt.”
Agave speaking, not aware that the “lion’s head” is the head of her son, Pentheus, whom she recently dismembered with her bare hands in religious ecstasy; Euripides (485-406 BC), The Bacchants (Translation by Moses Hadas and John McLean), lines 1209-12ff.
“I always begin from the immediate situation
And then go back as far as I find necessary.
You see, your memories of childhood -
I mean, in your present state of mind -
Would be largely fictitious; and as for your dreams,
You would produce amazing dreams, to oblige me.
I could make you dream any kind of dream I suggested,
And it would only go to flatter your vanity
With the temporary stimulus of feeling interesting.”
Henry, examining Edward; T. S. Eliot, The Cocktail Party (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1950), 2.1, p. 111.
“Much of the grubbiness is clean dirt if only you will leave it in the garden and not keep on sprinkling it over the library table.”
C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves (New York: HBJ, 1960), 20.
