The Captain's Sculpture, parts 76 - 79

76. It turned out that my mother had a sort of specific aesthetic sense, an aesthetic sense of her own, not one handed down to her by accident because of a family history, or an aesthetic sense arrived at completely by accident, which would be the opposite of any personal aesthetic.

 

77. My mother’s ‘taste” in things like furniture, paintings, figurines, silverware and dishes and the like was circumscribed and controlled by so many extraneous factors that you have to excuse me for assuming that she had no taste at all.

78. Foremost was the question of cost. If there were plates in the kitchen cupboard they were there because they were plates we could afford, this was the first consideration.

79. In the living room there was a better set of dishes in a hutch for use when we had guests on a Sunday afternoon for dinner, but the form and quality of both the hutch and the dishes was determined by cost.