Ode to a Commode

Edmund Wilson – the first critic with the prescience to formally acknowledge the greatness of Joyce, Proust, Yeats, and Stein; author of one of the great dissections of Marx, Engels, and their predecessors (To The Finland Station); did the same for the Civil War (Patriotic Gore); weighed the significance of the Dead Sea Scrolls; one of my heroes – on the superiority of the American commode:

I have had a good many more unplighting thoughts, creative and expansive visions – while soaking in comfortable baths or drying myself after bracing showers – in well-equipped American bathrooms than I have ever had in any cathedral. Here the body purges itself, and along with the body, the spirit. Here the mind becomes free to ruminate, to plan ambitious projects. The cathedrals, with their distant domes, their long aisles and their high groinings, do add stature to human strivings; their chapels do give privacy for prayer. But the bathroom, too, shelters the spirit, it tranquilizes and reassures, in surroundings of a celestial whiteness, where the pipes and the faucets gleam and the mirror makes another liquid surface, which will render you, shaved, rubbed and brushed, a nobler and more winning appreciation.

– from "Europe" (A Piece of My Mind).