Chairs
Here and there in the rural districts people still talk about professors as holding chairs in this or that subject at some college or university. When they do this they make me remember that the chair was once cousin to the throne. It was an affair of some state. Our remotest ancestors did not sit on chairs; they sat on branches when they had time to sit at all. Our mediate ancestors, having come down to earth, sat on it, or on the floors of the houses they built, or on any odd piece of furniture that came handy. Chairs marked the great who used them, such as kings and senators and bishops. Only our most immediate ancestors, in the last few centuries, ever thought of having enough chairs to go round. Within the memory of plenty of living men quite respectable households, even in the United States, have required children to stand at meals, partly because there were more children than chairs and partly because it did not seem worth while to get more chairs for the relatively unimportant members of the household. Now everybody has chairs—even infants and dolls and dogs and cats; even prisoners in jails; even professors, in fact as well as name. The race has grown sedentary.
What, the moralist inquires, is to be the effect of all this sitting? Not being very moralistic, I answer calmly that the chief effect is to make people fatter than they used to be. The vital and sanitary statistics that are always appearing about the increase of the average age and height of mankind never have a word to say about the increase of average weight. But it is clear that the race is heavier and that chairs have helped to raise the ponderous average. When the race sat on branches the fat men broke the branches, fell, and broke their necks. When the race sat on the floor the fat women grew lean by getting up and down so often. Nor after chairs came in did fatness evolve at once. To have to move one of those primitive settles a few times a day was enough to keep weight down; to sit on their oaken planes and angles was never comfortable enough to make the laziest do it long. Did the Puritan Fathers and Mothers fatten sitting in the straight-backed chairs and pews of their age? No, it remained for the padded and upholstered chair to do the work, for the rocker and the morris chair, for the sprawling chair of the hotel lobby and the trustees’ room.
Consider what happens. The most strenuous man of business, when he sinks into a chair in the hotel thinks dimly—if he is literate enough for that—about “taking mine ease in mine inn” and fattens almost under the very eye. Yet even this is nothing to the process in the trustee’s chair. Something drowsy hangs over it; something soft slumbers in it and infects the sitter. The moment the trustee sits down he feels his spine agreeably melting; he slips deeper in his seat and listens to the committee reports as from a muted distance; he has a sense of power which he realizes it is manners to exercise quietly; he looks with sleepy disapproval upon plans to raise salaries or cut dividends or reinvest funds or elect new trustees; he softens till he is scarcely vertebrate; his bones matter less and less; in time he does not know which is chair and which is he. The fatness of the chair has struck upward to his head. As a certain poet of the primitive has it:
Men in chairs
Put on airs.