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Practice Reading: Multiple Choice, Multiple Answers
ID: #38221
Comfort
Comfort is now one of the causes of its own spread. It has now become a physical habit, a fashion, an ideal to be pursued for its own sake. The more comfort is brought into the world, the more it is likely to be valued. To those who have known comfort, discomfort is a real torture. The fashion which now decreases the worship of comfort is quite as imperious as any other fashion. Moreover, enormous material interests are bound up with the supply of the means of comfort. The manufacturers of furniture, of heating apparatus, of plumbing fixtures cannot afford to let the love of comfort die. In modem advertisement they have found a means for compelling it to live and grow. A man of means today, who builds a house, is in general concerned primarily with the comfort of his future residence. He will spend a great deal of money on bathrooms, heating apparatus, padded furnishings, and having spent, he will regard his house as perfect. His counterpart in an earlier age would have been primarily concerned with the impressiveness and magnificence of his dwelling with beauty, in a word, rather than comfort. The money our contemporary would spend on baths and central heating would have been spent on marble staircases, frescoes, pictures and statues. I am inclined to think that our present passion for comfort is a little exaggerated. Though I personally enjoy comfort, I have lived most happily in houses devoid of everything that modern men deem indispensable. However, comfort for me has a justification; it facilitates mental life. Discomfort handicaps thought; it is difficult to use the mind when the body is cold and aching.
In what respects is the outlook of a modern affluent man different from that of a medieval man?
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