Mrs. Blandings and Mr. Icarus

"Icarus" by Jose Luis Munoz

“In the kitchen, while all the most modern appliances of modern housekeeping splashed and span, Mrs. Blandings reflected upon men, the male sex, the masculine characteristics. Above all the essential primitive levels she could find very little to commend. Males were dedicated to the impossible. They achieved it just often enough — the luckiest ones, that is — to keep all the rest of the sex in a perpetual dither; perpetually sailing off in rockets to be vaporized out of existence; perpetually seeking the Absolute; perpetually falling into vats of boiling acid or perishing by falling two miles out of the sky. The death march of the lemmings into the sea was no more strange than the male’s hurling himself endlessly against the rock in the path until he should batter himself into oblivion, and the rock remain serene.”

— “Blandings’ Way” Eric Hodgins