The Sock Fairy

by Theodore Dalrymple (January 2013)

The Sock Fairy is a subtle demon, as subtle as the serpent in the Garden of Eden: for he, she or its produces dissension between me and my wife. I start off with the full intention of pairing the socks exactly, but after a short time I lose my determination and think that any pairing, provided only that it is not too grossly discordant, will do. After all, if on close examination I cannot be sure that the socks are not a pair, surely no one is going to notice that they are not (if they are not) when I wear them. Nobody examines the socks of his interlocutor that closely.

When it comes to the pairing of socks, however, my wife is deontological rather than utilitarian. Good enough is not good enough. Once you accept to wear different socks, however similar they may appear on casual inspection to be, you are on the slippery slope that leads to scruffiness, to wearing ties with soup stains, to looking like a tramp. And we are fast approaching the age at which it would be very easy to let ourselves go. We might even become smelly.

It is many years since I first became aware of the problem created by the Sock Fairy, and so far have found no solution to it. But there is an interesting lesson about human psychology here, and it is this: how quickly one assumes that an irritation in life or an apparent problem is the result of ill will on the part of an animate being with some kind of grudge against one. Of course, when socks appear to have gone missing in the washing machine, I am perfectly aware that the appearance is unlikely to be the reality: that the rule is ten socks in, tens socks out, and so forth. It is much more likely that I mistook the number of socks that I put in the machine than that any of them disappeared in the wash. And if any of them did disappear there would be a perfectly rational, that is to say materialist, explanation of their disappearance,

But although I think this with what I might call the official part of my mind, that is to say that part of my mind that I am willing to acknowledge as being fully mine, yet (if I am honest) I cannot entirely rid myself of the suspicion that there is an animate force somewhere nearby that has worked against me when socks appear to have gone missing or become dis-paired. Naturally, the suspicion is not sufficiently strong for me to do anything about it, by (for example) trying to propitiate the Sock Fairy with some kind of sacrifice. What, apart from socks, would the Sock Fairy want or be satisfied with? It is probable that socks are not an end in themselves for this nasty being: as flies to wanton boys are we to the Sock Fairy.

I wonder how many of us can do entirely without our illusions, how many of us can face reality, especially about ourselves, exactly as it is? Humankind cannot bear very much reality, said T S Eliot, and I suspect he was right. On the other hand, humankind cannot survive too much illusion either. It is a difficult balance to strike, especially for oneself.

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