I have just come across this in the book I am currently reading:
This, I have come to think, is a very American reaction, rewarding eccentric effort with scorn and violence.
The book is one that Christopher got me for Xmas, titled Fresh Air Fiend by Paul Theroux.
I agree with him that it is a typical American reaction. But I’ll go even further. It is the reaction of any peasant to unknown or unintelligible behaviour. I have been greeted, as has many a human I have known, by such upon numerous occasions. I surely have mellowed from my outwardly eccentric ways over the years (and I find this unfortunate, to tell you the truth), but they still broil within at similar temperatures as they did in my youth.
In a village in the Czech Republic, I go swaggering in wearing outlandish clothing, unwashed, with a capacious pack on my back, and I’ll get odd stares, hear peasants muttering behind my back, be passively scorned. Being a peasant is an insular state of being, no matter the outward appearance. In Theroux’s book, the man who arrived after a 2600 mile journey in a rowboat is scored by drunks and ruffians. America being what it is, a parallel in most of Europe would just be passive-agressive scurrility.
The group I fell into in Prague was insular. It was evidenced by the long table they sat at in Hadry. Other such groups existed and interaction between them was limited to the occasional foozball tournament. I fell in and I fell out eventually because I did not conform to their particular set of eccentricities. My own were, as Christian says, out.
Being out is relative to the insular group which drifts in and out of your social patterns the most.
