Long Live Pavlov!
You may have thought, in tuning to | Mr. G. W. Parkyn from 4YA, that in his talk on "Custom," you were going to hear of some curious and foreign ways of doing things (like wearing a fez and having one or two extra wives)-things you can dismiss virtuously with a feeling of superiority as not affecting your own life in any degree. How wrong you would be. According to the speaker, custom is not something they have in those foreign parts; it is here and now. It grabs hold of you when you are born and doesn’t let go of you till you are safely dead and buried. Your life is made up of a series of acts in which, whether you do it consciously or not, you either conform to custom or flout it (the latter usually with drastic consequences). Seeing there is little we can do about it, the customary thing to do is to choose a way of life and stick to it. Some of us choose the workbench, the suburban garden; the Saturday football; others the ‘cocktail, the flaunted finery, and the social ladder; still others the book, the candle, and the bell. Within the same society these cultures are-as alien to one another as the white man from the head-hunter. We may as well accept the fact that we are ruled by custom; for the chances that custom will alter your life are as thousands to one, against the unlikely chance that your life will alter in amy way the customs of the society into which you happen to be born. /
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https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/periodicals/NZLIST19450907.2.17.1.7
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 13, Issue 324, 7 September 1945, Page 9
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269Long Live Pavlov! New Zealand Listener, Volume 13, Issue 324, 7 September 1945, Page 9
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Copyright in the work University Entrance by Janet Frame (credited as J.F., 22 March 1946, page 18), is owned by the Janet Frame Literary Trust. The National Library has been granted permission to digitise this article and make it available online as part of this digitised version of the New Zealand Listener. You can search, browse, and print this article for research and personal study only. Permission must be obtained from the Janet Frame Literary Trust for any other use.
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