Over the years I’ve become frivolous. I used to be positively welded to my most heartfelt beliefs, my most visceral enthusiasms. It gave me an advantage with frivolous people who couldn’t trust their affected tastes – their received, fashion-driven tastes.
I knew What Really Mattered In Life. It was style – pin-sharp clothes; music – Pure Pop for Now People, and the rest. I preferred books to be mainly pictures. I knew, as a consequence, that I hated the idiotic things the people Julie Burchill called “educated beyond all instinct” came up with.
Educated men learn to talk prettily about a range of things they’ve got no natural interest in, no insight and zero connection or feeling for – Grexit, constitutional crises, the historic role of tubers. Fashion-driven stuff. Fashion drives everything in the Well-Stocked Mind; far more than in Kardashian Country.
But I’m getting that way now. I blame others. I find myself speaking pure policy wonk. Doing International Relations patter. I blame a friend who introduced me to too many historians. I blame researching books originally meant to be about snobbery, style and great pictures and getting diverted into analysis.
Homme d’affaires talk is intended mainly to show the speaker’s education, status and connections. My reaction to that used to be: “Who you are speaks so loudly I can’t hear a thing you’re saying?” (Emerson).
But thanks to that friend, I find I’m being buried under a landfill of Big Ideas.
What do you think? Have your say below
