I think the point is, she thoroughly regrets being shallow. But as you noted, she was born in 1927. Consider how very radical this stuff would have been when she was in her prime. Depressing, right?
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It makes me despair for humanity, at sheer sordid poverty of human thought.
Sad things, bad things don’t upset me. This kind of thing upsets me. Honestly. It makes me feel so alone and depressed and I don’t mean that in an arseholish, superior yet passive aggressive way. But because it’s just so pervasive a way of thinking and expressing thought. If she ever actually wrote anything that genuinely indicated an ounce of regret, then that would be worthy of attention, but a bunch of vacant aphorisms decades before she died is just dirty-minded and avaricious.
I’m only being slightly hyperbolic. Don’t let yourself be manipulated into buying schlock: there is a whole wonderful world of real art out there.
I think slightly better of her knowing she didn’t write that in response to a terminal prognosis (and churning out a newspaper column twice a week for thirty years couldn’t have been easy). But still, I wouldn’t want to be remembered for I regret being so shallow. Finley’s right though, unfortunately, that the piece is probably illuminating for many.
It’s depressing. That kind of superficiality doesn’t get to me so much anymore because now I exist, largely, away from it. But, yes, all forms of popular idiocy bother me, including much of suburban life. I have a thing against men washing their already clean cars or mowing their already short lawns as though it was an expression of middle class moral decency, rather than sheer purposelessness. Maybe someone can start the Erma Bombeck Foundation, a charity which provides psychiatric counselling to housewives with ‘good’ living rooms.
