What is the charm of necklaces? Why would anyone put something extra around her neck and then invest it with special significance? A necklace doesn’t afford warmth in cold weather, like a scarf, or protection in combat, like chain mail; it only decorates. We might say it borrows meaning from what it surrounds and sets off: the head with its supremely important material contents, and the face, that register of the soul. When photograph reduces the reality it represents, they mention not only the passage from three dimensions to two, but also the selection of a?point du vue?favors the top of the body rather than the bottom and the front rather than the back. The face is the jewel in the crown of the body, and so we give it a setting.

　　When people are intensely concerned with something that is obviously impractical, anthropologists take note, for lovely useless things often express archaic to exist in contemporary American houses already heated by gas and electricity, yet most people want one and it is still the focus of the living room. This desire testifies, I think, to the hundreds of thousands of years during which we Homo sapiens huddled around a cave fire. We watch ourselves, rather anxiously, vanish backward down those lone temporary corridors, as my daughter gazes at her infinitely multiplied small self in the mutually opposed mirrors of the beauty salon, and wonders, is it me? Our fireplaces and necklaces and tombstones say it is, they are.

　　In American culture, an interest in necklaces seems to be rather gender specific. Many men to whom I mention the enterprise feign polite interest and then change the subject, though I know some who admire, construct, and wear necklaces, including the distinguished scientist and poet to whom this essay is dedicated. Most women, by contrast, become mildly or wildly enthusiastic. A doctor in Blois brought out her entire collection of costume jewelry for me, exhibited the most splendid pieces with an account of where and when they were purchased, and then explain them all with the help of a large glossy book on the history of costume jewelry, with dozens of pictures. A former student of mine who had moved to California mailed me six plastic boxes full of beads gleaned from a warehouse managed by an eccentric friend who just their settings; a feature bead painted with a naked lady; crystal roundels of truly exceptional shine; and tiny silver hematite seed beads. Beads lend themselves to exchange, Beads travel. And clearly these two facts are related.

Some men “feign polite interest” means _____.

• A.They are keenly interested
• B.They are not interested at all because they are men
• C.They are slightly interested
• D.They pretend to be interested out of politeness