Keeping Good Company

     ‘My idea of good company, Mr. Elliot, is the company of clever, well-informed people, who have a great deal of conversation; that is what I call good company.’
     ‘You are mistaken,’ said he gently, ‘that is not good company; that is the best…’

(Jane Austen, Persuasion, 1818).

Good company, which Mr. Elliot reduced to the requirements of ‘birth, education, and manners’ is nigh impossible to find. Fortunately, I am blessed by constantly being in the best company, but to understand me correctly requires an explication of Austen’s prose. There is nothing worse, I humbly aver, than people being clever. Intelligence ought to come with modesty, pertinent interventions, and humility. Clever people flaunt their superiority at any opportunity, lacing it with facetiousness and pedantic corrections. Clever people delight in the tripping up of others. Clever people know a variety of stratagems for penetrating the most fortified of hen houses.

So what did ‘clever’ mean? Our old friend Samuel Johnson first defined the word as ‘dextrous, skilful’; his second definition was ‘just, fit, proper, commodious’; and finally, ‘well-shaped, handsome’. Austen’s ‘clever’ company was, therefore, not so much vulpine as perfectly adapted to polite company, in both mental fitness, social appropriateness, and aesthetic appeal. Were such people ‘well-informed’, they would be devastatingly interesting. Their ‘great deal of conversation’ would not be mere artfulness around ladies, but a supreme engagement with the world and the like minds around them. The best company is sympathetic, challenging, and fair.

You may keep your clever people. I will take the best.

And Other Utterances

It is ‘Frosh Week’, which seems to mean that the neighbourhood goes to hell for a few days. Not being overly inclined to dwelling within Sodom and Gomorrah, I annually reflect on the reasons for this descent into every kind of vice. Alcohol, immaturity, and the complicity of the university authorities seem to make the lethal cocktail. The immaturity we may blame on the parents; the university should be ashamed of itself; the alcohol would perhaps not be such a problem without the other two. In any case, I wonder how many fun first weeks end in unanticipated tragedy of one form or another. The principal chant, boomed out military style all week by hordes of roaming children (with apologies to readers who’d care not to know), goes ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck, three cheers for fucking’. These words will no doubt haunt those afflicted with unintended pregnancies, diseases, and humiliations. And how many alcoholics begin their journey here?

 (c) 2010 academicmice.com

A less weighty observation to terminate this post: whooping, out of the mouths of young women, is unladylike; out of the mouths of young men it is effeminate. Can the young not find a more civilised way to utter their enthusiasm for their misguided lives?

Speaking in Tongues

Our Hollywood brethren have broadcast the myth that the essential qualifications for manliness can be boiled down to the bicep and the grunt, and the influence of this stalks our streets all too evidently, its knuckles knocking the sidewalks. It has been particularly effective in the English-speaking world, where the idea of intelligent writing has been reduced to such choice phrases as ‘Gr8 2 c u’. I shudder. Helping all this along is the prevailing Anglophone cultural arrogance that usually makes us unilingual. We readily dismiss the majority of the globe’s people since they are unable to speak English. And this is our loss.

I confess to being a victim of the aforementioned arrogance. At school, French was introduced at age 11, but the tuition was pitched at the least able, and the least able was unfortunately illiterate in English. Not much hope there. German began at 13, with similar ineffectiveness. The education system being what it was, nobody was compelled to continue with these foreign tongues after the age of 14. Even then, there was no clear idea put forward for why learning these languages might be an advantage. Since then, moves have been afoot to steer certain people away from language learning altogether because it is ‘not useful’. To that end, we might well dispense with school completely, and send young boys of a particular station down the mines at age 12.

Not if I can help it.

I am attempting to correct my own shortcomings, which I greatly regret, and doubtless another spell in Germany won’t do me any harm. For those youngsters currently progressing through school, certainly our first priority is to improve their English. But we should dare also to push them to engage with the other, for in teaching them to speak in tongues, we shall improve their brains. And if we improve their brains, we may make better men (and women) of them.

Hands: Shaken, or else Stirred

The elegant Lily Lemontree has been on top form of late, and if you are not among her followers already, I hasten you there. Of her recent posts, one on shaking hands caught my attention in particular. Anyone with any doubts about the whys and wherefores of this essential practice should look in with alacrity. I thought I’d add my two penn’orth on the subject, for the first one ever knows of a man is his handshake, and its importance cannot therefore be overlooked.

There are many good reasons to shake hands. First and foremost, the handshake behoves each participant to make eye contact, and a failure in this regard arouses all manner of suspicions about character. A man who cannot look another in the eye betrays a want of something – a mere lack of confidence may be misconstrued as shiftiness – and the other shaker would be judicious in proceeding with caution.

Second, the handshake establishes an equality between men, for if done properly each shaker will respect the other as well met. If not done properly, however, a superior shaker will immediately assume superiority over the man who proffers a limp wrist, or too soft a squeeze. The hierarchy may not be justified in fact, but how is the man who puts forward a sock in a cup for a handshake supposed to recover his status? First impressions are lasting impressions, and we should do well to remember that beginning on the wrong foot – or wrong hand – will set us back considerably.

The handshake is the very standard of sportsmanship. After fierce competition, the declaration of no personal animus ensures that the game continues to be played in the right spirit.

Finally, there is the horror, and the offence, of the absence of a handshake. Nothing could be more disturbing than a failure to shake on first meeting. I can think of no good reason for such a failure, and please spare me your hygienic scruples. What are we to make of such a man? Since he makes nothing of himself, I suggest we also make nothing of him.

A Musical Education

And perhaps a man brought out his guitar to the front of his tent. And he sat on a box to play, and everyone in the camp moved slowly in toward him, drawn in toward him. Many men can chord a guitar, but perhaps this man was a picker. There you have something – the deep chords beating, beating, while the melody runs on the strings like little footsteps. Heavy hard fingers marching on the frets. The man played and the people moved slowly in on him until the circle was closed and tight and then he sang “Ten-Cent Cotton and Forty-Cent Meat.” And the circle sang softly with him. And he sang, “I’m leaving Old Texas,” that eerie song that was sung before the Spaniards came, only the words were Indian then.

And now the group was welded to one thing, one unit, so that in the dark the eyes of the people were inward, and their minds played in other times, and their sadness was like rest, like sleep. He sang the “McAlester Blues” and then, to make up for it to the older people, he sang “Jesus Calls Me to His Side.” The children drowsed with the music and went into the tents to sleep, and the singing came into their dreams.

And after a while the man with the guitar stood up and yawned. Good night, folks, he said.

And they murmured, Good night to you.

And each wished he could pick a guitar, because it is a gracious thing.

(John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath).

The power to enchant; to bring together; to bond through common voice; to discover humanity through melody; to bare one’s soul to strangers and thereby to gain their confidence: this sounds like a rare power. But such is the power of the musician, and particularly the guitarist. I have had the pleasure to be the man in Steinbeck’s description on a number of glorious campfire-lit nights in dusty America, and in those moments of shared song, and in the thrilled eyes of the listener who discovers you can play his favourite ballad, I have experienced something akin to pure joy.

It is a long road to that moment, of pain and practice, of failure and frustration. To play fluently, spontaneously, and with abandon, takes years of deliberate action, muscle memory, and dedication. Hours each day of tuneless fumbling, the sound near to the dying wails of a wild animal. No one wants to listen to you, or even to be around you in your obsessive and compulsive need to get it right. But the glimmer of a future moment, when the sparks of a fire will be sucked into a sky untainted by another manmade light, and when the assembled faces of new friends and old will hang on every note, convinces you that the struggle will be worth it. And not only for you.

To play is to have learned to play. And to learn to play is to understand that life does not come ready made. One doesn’t necessarily need a music teacher, but one would be strongly advised to get a musical education.