Last week’s essay concerning the vanishing jalopy didn’t attract any public comment, but I had a small blitz of personal email about it. Only some of the messages concerned automobilia; the larger theme was cultural erasure or amnesia generally—things that used to be around, but seem to have disappeared, or that we have simply forgotten. Most of these were material: 78rpm-records, blocks of ice delivered by guys with huge tongs, glass milk bottles, that sort of thing. But whole tribes of human beings also vanished. Two Jehova’s Witnesses came to my door last week. They were the first in at least a decade, probably two or three decades, and the exception that reminded me of all the people who don’t come anymore, especially Fuller Brush salesmen. If the term “Fuller Brush Man” is meaningless to you, it simply proves my point.
One
terrible impoverishment of American culture is the general disappearance of
eccentricity. Where have all the
eccentrics gone? The demise of my
last two beloved aunts, who both died within the last decade, deprived me of my
last vital familial connection to genuine eccentricity. These two marvelous old ladies lived
together for much of their long lives in a ramshackle farmhouse built by one of their brothers (and my uncles) following the directions in an old set of
Audel building guides. Although
they were voracious readers of public library books, these volumes, along with a
large Bible, some nineteenth-century Masonic and Freethinking stuff deriving
from my grandfather, and what seemed to be the complete works of O. Henry, made
up the core of their highly eclectic permanent home collection.
Once
when I was quite young and all their other, elder siblings were still around I
picked up one of the soiled infidel tracts, a laudatory biography of Voltaire. Among the many reasons the author found
to admire the famous philosophe was
that he had publicly ridiculed “the cult of the prepuce of Jesus Christ.” With a large family group gathered
around the dinner table, I asked my Aunt Mildred, now long gone, “What’s a prepuce?” She turned bright red, but said only “Johnny!” When years
later I found out I was more struck by the erudition than the prudery. I noticed that book still on the
shelves in 2006, at the time of my Aunt Louise’s funeral.
Baxter County, Arkansas, 2004; Aunt Louise at the computer; in the background Aunt Edith, aet. 90
They generally dressed in what appeared to be the unsold items from a really scruffy yard sale. Their eyes were so weakened that they seemed never to notice that there was about a quarter of an inch of dust on everything—everything but the Scrabble board, that is, which was in daily use. Their hearing was also impaired, so that all communication, including that emanating from the television set, was at a level somewhere between a shout and a bellow. I rather imagine a conversation between Hardy and Lord Nelson on the quarterdeck during a typhoon. To cross their threshold really was to enter an alternate universe.
It
was a delightful realm, of course.
For there is all the difference in the world between an authentic
eccentric and the very strange people one sees in the subway. An eccentric is not a weirdo, a wino,
a sicko, or a psycho. Eccentricity is not
pathology, but self-confident and unaffected individuality developed to a
remarkable degree. It was from my
Aunt Louise that I must have inherited the journalistic impulse. For many years she published a column
in the local newspaper. It was
aptly entitled “A Little Off Center”.
The
chief cause of the decline of wholesome eccentricity is not difficult to
identify. It is the general
homogenization of culture. The
more we text and tweet and generally do our thing the more like everybody
else’s thing it becomes. The
current paucity of eccentrics is a result of historical changes long underway. The Golden Age of Eccentricity was
probably the period between 1750 and 1900 or so. Among the old books in my own library into which I dip from time
to time is a wonderful volume by John Timbs, English Eccentrics and Eccentricities (London, 1875). Since this is an anthology of English eccentrics, domestic animals
naturally make frequent appearance.
We are all familiar with the little old lady who leaves everything to
the cat; but all this pales in comparison with the habitual behavior of the
Rev. Henry Egerton, the son of the Bishop of Durham, and the eighth Earl of
Bridgewater.
The Earl of Bridgewater
This
learned and bibliophilic nobleman took up residence in Paris, where he became
an expert collector of early French literature. (The Egerton manuscripts in the British Library are today
among its notable medieval collections.) His lordship preferred canine to human company and was
wont to give elaborate dinner parties for his numerous dogs, all of them
sumptuously appareled and seated at his dinner table. “If he be lent a book, he carries his politeness so far as to
send it back, or rather have it conveyed home, in a carriage,” writes one
contemporary observer. “He gives
orders that two of his most stately steeds be caparisoned under one of his
chariots and the volume, reclining at ease in milord’s landau, arrives,
attended by four footmen in costly livery at the door of its astonished owner. His carriage is frequently to be seen
filled with his dogs.”
milord Egerton's dinner party
