Rough timetables, “appreciation schedules,” may be of some guidance. That pad dotted on both sides with suction cups, to which you can vertically affix a wet bar of soap while you are in the shower? It should remain unmentioned by any magazine’s “New and Noteworthy” column for six months. Each of us should have a fair chance of finding it, hanging unheralded from a hook in the hardware store, on our own. A good poem, as Horace suggested, ought to have a nine-year news blackout. And a major leisure item — a new sort of inflatable raft, for example — deserves at least five summers of quiet superiority before it gets a Best Buy rating from Consumer Reports and leans against the wall in the sporting-goods department at the high-volume discounters. After all, this successful raft — with its revolutionary osmotic inflater-valve — displaces several other very good makes of raft, which once so proudly rode the crest; and when we look through the still-hopeful catalogs of these inferior raft-crafters, and sense their anguish, deepening monthly, as they watch their sales go into steep decline, then they begin to take on rarity — the rarity of the underdog, one of the most seductive kinds — and we discover ourselves feeling, too soon, that we must root for the second-rate product. (Haven’t you felt a peculiar sort of worry about the chair in your living room that no one sits in? Haven’t you sometimes felt sleeve-tugs of compassion and guilt over an article of clothing that you dislike and therefore scarcely wear? Haven’t you at least once secretly sat down in the hardly-sat-in chair, wearing that ugly shirt, in order to rectify these inequities?) A little lengthening of the time it takes for new merit to out, for rare proficiencies to make their sudden bundle, would allow our sympathy for the underdog and our excitement in superiority to coincide; too rapid a transmittal of the knowledge of relative greatness, on the other hand, eliminates that beautiful period when these emotions overlap.
Subtotaling, then, we note that civilization ought to be superficially pigheaded, suspicious of all subversion, so that rarity can leap in with her accordion and startle the anatomy lesson. If the sadly underrated is kept sadly underrated, righteousness and a sense of urgent mission stay on the side of the deserving. But when all the goodies are pincered the moment they surface, when zoning rules demand public art in exchange for additional floor space, when writers curtail their finer efforts because the merest suggestion of expertise is enough to coast on for a decade, then one is unwillingly forced, in behalf of originality itself, to defend authority, stringency, unbendingness — not things one defends with real moral relish. So let the rare stay rare, at least for a while. Every piece of bad design praised does its bit to keep good designs under wraps. We need many incompetent arbiters; we need more choices to be foolish and uninformed.
Some desert fathers have gotten carried away, though. Say you are a genius, and you have just done something that has never been done before. There it lies, on your legal pad or your patio, as rare as it could possibly be. In a week or a year it might glint in thousands of other minds, like the tiny repeating images in a beetle’s eye. Paul Valéry has some stern words for you: “Every mind considered powerful begins with the fault that makes it known,” he writes. And: “the strongest heads, the most sagacious inventors, the most exacting connoisseurs of thought, must be unknown men, misers, who die without giving up their secret.” Even putting an idea in words, according to Arthur Schopenhauer, is a sellout: “As soon as our thinking has found words it ceases to be sincere or at bottom serious. When it begins to exist for others it ceases to live in us.” The self-canceling quality of these verbal arguments for silence is obvious. Still, if behind them is simply the wish for a kind of privacy, for the insulation of inattention, for a few delays in the final sentencing of a thought, for a little sorrow intermixed with one’s eager self-expression, then any prudent introvert would raise a concurring absinthe glass.
Things often work better, too, when the portions of each person’s life that are wholly devoted to a quest for the rare are themselves somewhat infrequent. The staggering fluke and the exhilarating pathology ought to surprise their first discoverers as much as they surprise the rest of us. It is always more pleasing when the sweepstakes is won by the family who sent off their entry distractedly, in the midst of errands and trips to the vet, than when it is won by that man with the flat voice, in the hooded parka, who sent in five hundred thirty-seven separate entries — except that ultimately rarity accrues to him as well, once we contemplate him: all those unshaven mornings at the post office, those readings of the fine-print contest guidelines, those copyings of “Dove is One Quarter Cleansing Cream” on three-by-five pieces of paper.
For everyone besides that rare man in the parka, the provisional moral may be: Pursue truth, not rarity. The atypical can fend for itself: our innate, unconquerable human appetite for it will never let it lie low for long. And very often, when we are looking over several common truths, holding them next to one another in an effort to feel again what makes them true, rarities will mysteriously germinate in the charged spaces between them, like those lovely, ghostly zings that a guitarist’s fingers make, as they clutch from chord to chord.
(1984)
MACHINERY
Model Airplanes
You don’t need a set of Pactra enamels, or airbrush equipment, or jewelers’ files; not forceps or a pin vise; you don’t need to know the variations in camouflage adopted by the F-5E Tiger II 527th Aggressor Squadron at Alconbury from 1976 through 1988, or know, indeed, anything at all about war or history or military hardware; you don’t need to harbor angry thoughts toward enemies abroad or at work. But a simple tube of glue, at the very least, might seem necessary for any appreciation of the plastic model-airplane kit. And some minimal grade-school exposure to glue, or “cement,” as the technical prefer to call it, is an important early step toward the attainment of later, simpler, unpolymerized pleasures. Certainly glue, especially during those long summer afternoons in the late sixties and early seventies, before oil of mustard was added to the recipe to discourage any direct attempts at mood alteration, was lovely stuff. When you tweaked off the dried wastrel from an earlier session and applied a gentle pressure to the Testor’s tube, a brand-new Steuben-grade art-blob of cooling poison would silently ensphere itself at the machined metal tip, looking, with its sharp gnomonic surface highlights and distilled, vodkal interior purity, like a self-contained world of incorruptible mental concentration, the voluptuously pantographed miniaturization of the surrounding room, and the artist’s rendering on the Monogram box top, and the half-built fighter itself, along with the hands that now reached to complete it; and as the smell of this pellucid solvent, suggestive of impossible Mach numbers and upper atmospheres and limitless congressional funding, drove away any incompatible carbon-based signals of hunger or human frailty, you felt as if your head had somehow gained admission to and submerged itself within that glowing globule of formalism and fine-motor skills. When you held a pair of halved components tightly together for ten minutes, glaring at them, willing the tiny, glue-dolloped pins to turn to toffee and join forever their complementary sockets, you weren’t worried by, you even welcomed, the bead that often reemerged along the seam as evidence of the static force of your grip, and you waved the subassembly around to speed its drying, in this way separately “flying” each wheel or pitot tube or stabilator, in order to extract its unique contribution to overall airworthiness, before you united it with the Spartan society of the fuselage. Glue was the jet fuel of 1:72 scale — inflammable, icy, dangerous. Its end wasn’t speed itself, but the appreciation of speed — an idea that needed to be pieced together slowly, over hours of chair-bound, stiff-necked application, until vibration and afterburners and the sense of being almost out of control all rotated and mapped themselves onto an alternative imaginary dimension, where they were represented by an out-of-focus desert of clean newsprint, by the weightless reflection of a watch crystal across a high wall, and by a large whitish thumbprint permanently imprinted on green plastic.