I have been thinking lately about our many quirks and contradictions.
Some oddities are charming, others, eh, not so much, and most fall somewhere in between those two poles.
Even animals have them. I know of a cat that will not even consider eating until his baffled owner first drops a spoonful of meat on its head.
“I have no idea why,” the man sighs.
Some oddities we try to keep hidden. Others are out there for the world to see.
My late mother, Irene Whale, IQ of 142, leavened by more than 40 years in emergency rooms, was saddled with an inexplicable, unbendable refusal to put any album on any turntable. No way, no how. Often I did it for her. Once I asked her why. She wouldn’t say. In the end, she left us, her family, to wonder.
Then there are the human oddballs, eccentrics and screwballs with which the writer E.T.A. Hoffmann populates his fiction. My favorite is “Councillor Krespel,” or, in the original German, “Rat Krespel,” about whom Hoffmann says:
“There are men from whom nature or a special destiny has taken away the cover behind which the mad folly of the rest of us runs its course unobserved. They are like thin-skinned insects, which, as we watch the restless play of their muscles, seem to be misshapen, while nevertheless everything soon comes back into its proper form again. All that with us remains thought, passes over with Krespel into action. That bitter scorn which the spirit that is wrapped up in the doings and dealings of the earth often has at hand, Krespel gives vent to in outrageous gestures and agile caprioles. But these are his lightning conductors.”
A woman once described to me the meanest old cuss of a teacher she ever had, perhaps the sourest geezer on Earth. She dreaded his classes. One afternoon she happened to be walking along a hospital corridor and spied ol’ grumpy pants in the birthing unit of a nearby hospital, cradling, cooing and comforting a swaddled baby in his lap. And when he looked up and saw her, he smiled, put a finger to his lips, and whispered, “shhh.”
Consider what the conductor and music critic Deems Taylor said in a 1939 essay about one man, “a monster of conceit,” a man with “delusions of grandeur,” who believed himself to be Shakespeare, Beethoven and Plato, rolled into one, and who would launch into endless monologues about himself to make sure his hapless listeners knew what a wonder he was.
An unscrupulous man who borrowed from everyone who was good for a loan, and never paid the money back. A man who stole his second wife from his most devoted friend and admirer, a man completely selfish in his other personal relationships, which lasted as long as others were useful to him. The minute they failed him 0r began to lessen in usefulness, he cast them off without a second thought.
“He would pull endless wires to meet some man who admired his work, and was able and anxious to be of use to him — and would then proceed to make a mortal enemy of him with some idiotic, and wholly uncalled-for exhibition of arrogance and bad manners,” Taylor wrote.
Taylor’s “monster of conceit” was Richard Wagner, the German composer of 13 operas in all, among them the four works of the Ring Cycle, The Flying Dutchman, and Parsifal. Everything Taylor said about him is on record.
But none of it mattered in the backward glance of history. Because, as Taylor writes, “this undersized, disagreeable, fascinating little man was right all the time. The joke was on us. He was one of the world’s great dramatists; he was a great thinker; he was one of the most stupendous musical geniuses that the world has ever seen. When you consider that he wrote thirteen operas and music dramas, when you listen to what he wrote, the debts and heartaches that people had to endure from him don’t seem much of a price.”
For years I struggled with what to make of such people. Until the day I took a hard look in the mirror and realized I was just as weird. As, I believe, the rest of us are.
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Robert Whale can be reached at robert.whale@soundpublishing.com.
