Daily Inspiration Quote by Djuna Barnes

Barnes skewers Bohemia by pinning its grand egalitarian myth to its most mundane pressure point: who’s carrying the tray. The line starts like a toast to the café-utopia version of avant-garde life - everyone “as good as everyone else” - then immediately tightens into a trap. If Bohemia really abolishes rank, why does it still require a waiter? And if it requires a waiter, doesn’t it require someone “a little less” to make the fantasy run smoothly?

The brilliance is in the syntactic bait-and-switch. Barnes uses the polite, almost gossipy “isn’t” and “must not” to mimic social consensus, then lets the logic do the dirty work. “A little less than a waiter” is a wicked phrase: it suggests that even the service role isn’t permitted full dignity, because a “good Bohemian” waiter must perform humility as an aesthetic. In other words, Bohemia isn’t just a scene with hierarchy; it’s a scene that turns hierarchy into style.

Barnes wrote out of early 20th-century modernist circles where “Bohemian” was both self-mythology and brand, often subsidized by invisible labor (waiters, seamstresses, patrons, wives). The subtext is class critique without sermonizing: radicals of taste can be conservatives of comfort. Her question doesn’t ask whether equality is possible; it asks who equality is for when the bill arrives.