ポン酢形式

主に解析数論周辺/言語などを書くブログです。PCからの閲覧を推奨します。

暮らし: 100円ショップに行ったよ

今日は日本の「100円ショップ」というものに初めて連れていってもらう機会があり、さてあまりにもたのしすぎたので日記をつけようという気でいます:

Seria

並んでいる商品の みかけ からはその値段があまりに信じられないものなので、自分の手で確かめるためにセルフレジでバーコードを読み取らせようとでもいおう気でいる始末、and lo and behold, 看板に偽りはなさそうです:

Children have two advantages: they don’t know what they’re supposed to like and they don’t understand money, so price is never a guide to value for them. They have to rely instead on their own delight (or lack of it) in the intrinsic merits of the things they’re presented with and this can take them in astonishing (and sometimes maddening) directions. They’ll spend an hour with one button. We buy them a costly wooden toy made by Swedish artisans who hope to teach lessons in symmetry and find that they prefer the cardboard box that it came in. They become mesmerized by the wonders of turning on the light and therefore proceed to try it 100 times. They’d prefer the nail and screw section of a DIY shop to the fanciest toy department or the national museum.

　

This attitude allows them to be entranced by objects which have long ago ceased to hold our wonder. If asked to put a price on things, children tend to answer by the utility and charm of an object, not its manufacturing costs. This leads to unusual but – we recognize – more rightful results. A child might guess that a stapler costs £100 and would be deeply surprised, even shocked, to learn that a USB stick can be had for just over £1. Children would be right, if prices were determined by human worth and value, but they’re not; they just reflect what things cost to make. The pity is, therefore, that we treat them as a guide to what matters, when this isn’t what a financial price should ever be used for.

We have been looking at prices the wrong way. We have fetishized them as tokens of intrinsic value, we have allowed them to set how much excitement we are allowed to have in given areas, how much joy is to be mined in particular places. [...]

　

— The School of Life: An Emotional Education (2019), p. 244

姉にこの一連のことを話すと「え～、日本人なのに～！」という反応をされたが、現象学的に距離をとった '観光客' としての自分にはむしろ褒め言葉にきこえた*1:

さて、セルフレジで会計 ("いや、これが百円はありえない !..") をすませたあとに感じた、値段に関するある種の「バグ」には既知感をおぼえた:

たとえば荻窪のほかにも 水中書店さん (三鷹) の店外、とくに 左側の棚・下から二段目のすこし右のほう には (効率よく周回・厳選していると、運が良ければ) 驚くべき spawn がある:

Piaget, Derrida, Chomsky, general linguistics etc

この全十冊が各100円の均一、他で買おうとすれば少なくとも合計1桁は変わりそうです (実際に古書店でみつけるのにはあまりにきびしそうだということで、海外から取り寄せるということにもなれば1冊分の送料だけで1000円なんて超えてしまうだろうことには容易に想像がつくわけです)。

[...] However, we can pay less attention to what things cost and more to our own responses. The people who have most to teach us here are artists. They are the experts at recording and communicating their enthusiasms, which, like children, can take them in slightly unexpected directions. The French artist Paul Cézanne spent a good deal of the late nineteenth century painting groups of apples in his studio in Provence. He was thrilled by their texture, shapes and colours. He loved the transitions between the yellowy golds and the deep reds across their skins. He was an expert at noticing how the generic word ‘apple’ in fact covers an infinity of highly individual examples. Under his gaze, each one becomes its own planet, a veritable universe of distinctive colour and aura – and hence a source of real delight and solace.

The apple that has only a limited life, that will make a slow transition from sweet to sour, that grew patiently on a particular tree, that survived the curiosity of birds and spiders, that weathered the mistral and a particularly blustery May is honoured and properly given its due by the artist (who was himself extremely wealthy, the heir to an enormous banking fortune – it seems important to state this, to make clear that Cézanne wasn’t simply making a virtue of necessity and would have worshipped gold bullion if he’d had the chance). Cézanne had all the awe, love and excitement before the apple that Catherine the Great and Charles II had before the pineapple; but Cézanne’s wonderful discovery was that these elevated and powerful emotions are just as valid in relation to things which can be purchased for the small change in our pockets. Cézanne in his studio was generating his own revolution, not an industrial revolution that would make once-costly objects available to everyone, but a revolution in appreciation, a far deeper process, that would get us to notice what we already have to hand. Instead of reducing prices, he was raising levels of appreciation – which is a move perhaps more precious to us economically because it means we can all access great value with very little money.

　

— The School of Life: An Emotional Education (2019), p. 243

-- 住んでみててちょっと思うけどね、もしかして日本の良さとはひとつ「暮らし」にあるかもね

*1:ほら、自身の地元を '観光客' として -- 同じ場所を違う目で観察しながら -- 歩けることほどたのしいものはないでしょ ? -- もちろん、(Alexis de Tocqueville のいうように) ここで individualisme [自己満足] なんてゆるされたものではなく、Proust の想定した芸術家 (や彼自身) ぐらい努力する才能がなければね: ところで、このまえの誕生日に Paris 旅行をしたあとの Ruby Granger はこのことをよく理解していたと思うよ ("I'm aware that travelling to new places and seeing new places ... that's what gives you new perspectives, and that's what helps you to see the world in new ways"): https://youtu.be/UrE0PeZVQ6s?t=889