John Singer Sargent: Venetian Glass Workers (1880–82)

ABOUT THIS ARTWORK
Trained in Paris, John Singer Sargent traveled to Spain, the Netherlands, and Italy early in his career in order to study how painters such as Diego Velázquez and Frans Hals captured the effects of light and rendered figures in space. Venetian Glass Workers is one of several genre scenes featuring glass-bead workers that Sargent executed in the early 1880s. This backlit view of a shop in Venice is dark and atmospheric except for the brilliant strokes of light green and silvery white paint that describe the canes of glass as tradespeople prepare to cut them into bead-sized pieces, which will then be polished and strung into jewelry.

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"…everything's extraordinary, especially and including CommonDecency."

I once inhabited a now utterly mythical place: The Past. What seemed ordinary and commonplace then, when it was present, seems utterly extraordinary and absolutely unattainable now. I do not mean that some rare and special things are now rarer and even more special, but that even the most pedestrianly commonplace items have now joined the ranks of the exceptional. I can almost experience these once-so-ordinary things vicariously now, through dreams and fading memories, though the colors and textures seem blunted after the passage of so much time.

I have been noticing lately just how remarkable almost everything suddenly seems. I have caught myself appreciating even the more common items as if they were manifest miracles, perhaps because they are, and also because I’m sure they will one day seem even more remarkable, before nobody will be left to remember their textures and substance. Even those items that won’t disappear will change in response to their surrounding contexts. This old oak desk, which has been following me around for forty years, has seemed different in each of its many contexts. Its drawers remain filled with stuff that seemed appropriate several iterations ago, but I do not know what belongs there now or where what once belonged there should go instead. People grow ever longer tails as they age and experience things.

What of CommonDecency? People have been asking me and each other lately: Whatever happened to it? Where did it go? Why has it seemed to disappear? The more I search, the more I’ve felt convinced that Decency hasn’t actually gone anywhere. It’s still just as here as it ever was. No, we have not grown coarser or cruder over the intervening decades. We were not actually better or worse before; we were just remarkably similar, though the ways we measure might have changed considerably. I’m learning, or I think that I am, that Decency comes in only one flavor, one I might best describe as extraordinary. There never was what we’ve always referred to as CommonDecency; only the ordinarily extraordinary kind ever existed.

Decency might be commonly perceived and labeled, but each act might more easily be classified as truly exceptional, for each demonstrated the astounding human capability for Decency from the astonishing array of often much more available alternatives. Decency seems to rarely be the most convenient choice. One must frequently put themselves out to accomplish it. It’s like choosing the more costly alternative, even though no clear advantage seems to be associated with it. Decency only ever matters in this choice. Attempts to tame or commonplace it undermine its underlying intent. It’s supposed to be rare, even when it’s seemingly everywhere. Its commonality in no way explains away its native extraordinariness.

The moment after Decency’s invoked, it joins the ranks of every experience I had in my youth, even the mean or vindictive ones, even the most indecent. I feel as though I’ve been tossing my experiences down into a deep and mildly disturbing well where they will be rendered inaccessible: Nevermore. On my best days, I feel like I’m sitting on the prow of history in the making. Every damned thing seems fleeting. Everything I’ve created might as well have turned to dust in the moment immediately following its creation, because it has. Nobody’s any more the master of any moment than the least of any of us ever was. This amounts to no kind of tragedy, for this world has always worked like this. Sometimes the seductive illusion of permanence convinces us otherwise. Still, when I pay close attention to what actually seems to be going on around me, I can clearly see that I’m surrounded by the extraordinary, where the sole commonality must be that everything’s extraordinary, especially and including CommonDecency.

©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #Decency, #PureSchmaltz