Hermione and Her Little Group of Serious Thinkers/Vibrations

124304Hermione — VibrationsDon Marquis

VIBRATIONS


HAVE you thought much about Vibrations?

We’re taking them up this week—a Little Group of Advanced Thinkers I belong to, you know—and they’re wonderfully worth while—wonderfully so!

That’s what I always ask myself—is a thing worth while? Or isn’t it?

Vibrations are the key to everything. Atoms used to be, but atoms have quite gone out.

The thing that makes the new dances so wonderfully beneficial, you know, is that they give you Vibrations.

To an untrained mind, of course, Vibrations would be dangerous.

But I always feel that the right sort of mind will get good out of anything, and the wrong sort will get harm.

The most interesting woman talked to us the other night—to our little group, you know—on one-piece bathing suits and the Greek spirit.

Don’t you just dote on the Greeks?

They had some of the most modern ideas—it seems we get a lot of our advanced thought from them, if you get what I mean.

They were so unrestricted, too. One has only to look at their friezes and vases and things to realize that.

And the one-piece bathing suit, so the woman said, was an unconscious modern effort to get back to the Greek spirit.

She had a husband with her. He doesn’t lecture or anything, you know.

But she isn’t so very Greek-looking herself, although her spirit is so Greek, so she has this Greek-looking husband to wear the sandals and the tunics and the togas and things.

She calls him Achilles.

It’s quite proper, you know—Achilles stays behind a screen until she wants him to illustrate a point, and then he comes out with a lyre or a lute or something, and just stands and looks Greek. And then he goes back behind the screen and changes into the next garment she needs.

Of course, there are lots of men couldn’t stand it as well as Achilles. But when you come to that, there are lots of men who don’t look so very well in bathing suits, either.

And, of course, our American men don’t have the temperament to carry off a thing like that.

Of course, if we all turned Greek it would be quite a shock right at first to see everybody come into a dining-room or a drawing-room looking like Achilles does.

Not that temperament makes so much difference as it did a few years ago, you know—temperament and personality are going out and individuality is coming in.

Have you thought much about automatic writing?

It’s being taken up again, you know.

Not the vulgar, old-fashioned kind of spiritualism—that was so ordinary, wasn’t it?

The new ghosts are different. More—more—well, more refined, somehow, you know. Like the new dances as compared with that horrid turkey-trot.

One should always ask one’s self: “Does this have a refining influence on me; and through me on the world?”

For, after all, there is a duty one owes to society in general.

Have you seen the new sunshades?