Louis-Léopold Boilly: The Five Senses (1823)

"Decency primarily exists in the cloudy eyes of its beholders."

Decency requires certain sensitivities before it can be successfully deployed. One must accurately perceive one’s surroundings before one can engage congruently. Imperfections can create divergences such that Decencies escape my ability to properly muster them. I increasingly exist out of context, disconnected from the surrounding world.

Early on, I sensed that this world was someone else’s. It was as if I was just visiting and not quite a full inhabitant yet. Initially, I hadn’t even developed a sense of impending inclusion. It seemed that the world had already been conquered and that I would forever be excluded from initiating personal preference. In deference to those who came before me, though they couldn’t have known the impression I received from mutely watching them so masterfully performing. I had not found words to describe alienation, and even if I had, I doubt that I would have then diagnosed myself as in any way alienated. I wasn’t a blank slate, but I was apparently learning. I dutifully became more headstrong and began insisting on certain things as a matter of personal preference, sometimes of urgent need. I learned that neediness could easily turn unseemly, the father or mother of much indecency. I slowly became more sensitive to what fit and what didn’t, and behaved more or less accordingly.

I realize now that I never completely outgrew that sense of distance, the feeling that I hadn’t quite figured out this world and my place in it. I tended to avoid situations I couldn’t untangle or hadn’t yet untangled, so I developed no compensating behaviors that would allow me to properly engage. Decency stood beyond me there, and I privately labeled many of those contexts indecent, perhaps only because I couldn’t grok their principles. They often seemed unprincipled to me, which seemed like the very soul of indecency. I found my spots, the contexts within which my experiences had seemingly properly prepared me to perform Decently. I had a few decades where I could more or less comfortably exist within my skin, and within which my skin even seemed to fit me. But that sense of fitness eventually turned into a wasting asset. The world continued to change, and I guess I slowed down in my ability to keep up with it. I started feeling out of context. It now seems that I’m destined to feel increasingly out of context as I exit.

The world seems to belong to somebody else again, like it did when I was ten. Then, people seemed to have stronger presences. The often confusing ambiguity nearly everybody exhibits today was largely absent from my world then. Yes, I suppose I didn’t perceive the ambiguities that were there then, but the quality of the images before me was much less confusing. People seemed to stay in role better, which made them more predictable. As I grew into my teens, I gained sensitivity to my own preferences and to society’s unspoken expectations. I was called out for coloring outside expected lines, and I complied or resisted as I felt called to respond. I learned right from wrong and felt as though my judgment was generally good and that I could trust it. I strayed sometimes, but I never wandered too far across any line. I fit.

Now, I feel increasingly disconnected. I frequently feel as though I’ve missed a memo announcing something coming into or out of vogue. I frequently feel blindsided and confident that I’m not merely lost or confused, but also irrelevant. My perspective doesn’t amount to a hill of beans in the current social economy. I cannot for the life of me keep up with current events. I hold antique sensibilities. I do not believe in microwave cookery. I can get to the bottom of some menus without finding anything I’m familiar with, let alone anything I’m even distantly interested in trying. The latest fads slip by me without leaving an impression. Most people hold jobs I cannot relate to. I am increasingly inhabiting a world of my own, one with few attractions, where almost everything has been reduced to the level of distraction. I’m growing out of context again.

Decency requires certain sensitivities before it can be successfully deployed., and some of those sensitivities erode as we age. The implicate order we intuitively understood in middle age grows increasingly confusing as we roam further from that middle. The downside seems to be for disengagement. I observe the fashion and manners of an increasingly ancient age. I wear the equivalent of a morning coat and top hat compared to the Oompa-Loompa shorts and tattoo sleeves worn by my younger contemporaries. My Decencies were once well-attuned to the realities around me. Now they increasingly seem better aligned with memories of how things used to be but are no longer and will never be again. I remain defiant in my Decency practices, insisting that my proprieties turn out to be more eternal than thou’s. It seems to have been each generation’s destiny to see their world go to Hell in the hands of their progeny, each of which invented fresh indecencies with which to inflict the future on their forebears. Decency primarily exists in the cloudy eyes of its beholders.

©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #Decency, #PureSchmaltz