EBTL.050817

Aim Low, That the Chariot May Swing to

Meet Your Mark

“It tastes like licorice,” the girl said and put the glass down.

“That’s the way with everything.”

“Yes,” said the girl. “Everything tastes of licorice. Especially all the things you’ve waited so long for, like absinthe.”

“…I wanted to try this new drink. That’s all we do, isn’t it—look at things and try new drinks?”

—Ernest Hemingway,

“Hills Like White Elephants” (1927)

The above might well be the bleakest, most succinct expression of existential malaise of the whole damned Lost Generation, but it still hits close to home, perhaps a little too near the contemporary bone. I personally derive a significant amount of pleasure and affirmation (existential, even) from the trying of new drinks, at least some of the time. Which may not say much for my spiritual health (I mean, I also like books and smiling dogs squinting in the sun), but it suggests at least that I suffer little mauvaise foi in my dilettance.1 At some point, in the midst of the semi-intentional self-sabotage of my academic career and listless pursuit of literary recognition, it occurred to me that dilettante may well best describe my situation in, and relationship to, the world: a confusion of soft skills and partial knowledges, unified only by their status as interests I have failed to pursue to the point of expertise (and the possibly mistaken impression that they add to my charm). This could have been a disappointing revelation, given that dilettante probably hasn’t been used as a positive descriptor in the past 270 years, but, like amateur, dilettante proves to have a kernel of etymological honesty in it. Roughly the same kernel, in fact. For where (as is fairly obvious) the root of amateur is love, and its essence to do something for the sake thereof (contrasted with the expert or professional), the root of dilettante is delectare—to delight. Historically, the dilettante delighted in art, specifically, and like the amateur was so driven not by professional (read: “serious”) aims or expectations, but by the sheer joy of the thing. If delight seems like a fluffy word, that is perhaps a good thing. The inability to pin down the qualities that make something delightful may be part of the charm. And while love and pleasure are not far removed, both have the tendency to grow stiff and calcareous with the serious discourse that accretes around them. Which is not to speak unilaterally ill of seriousness; indeed, there is certainly something to be said for the gratifications of pleasures harder-won, but the love of pleasure and the love of love can be quite ponderous things in the absence of delight.

In the early eighteenth century, the Society of Dilettanti was formed in London by a group of dukes and scholars and other professionally moneyed layabouts (NB: moneyed layabouts by profession, as opposed to professional Classicists) to appreciate and promote the appreciation of Greek and Roman art, but equally to do so in a spirit of light heartedness and considerable inebriation. Horace Walpole described them, I suppose disparagingly, as “a club for which the nominal qualification is having been in Italy, and the real one, being drunk,” although this reeks somewhat of the triumphalist moderationism that mistakes the result for the object and reduces everything else to mere pretext. The dilettante understands, contra Brillat-Savarin,2 that just because one has ended up sotted, distended, and groaning with one’s take, it does not mean one failed to truly appreciate what was put before one. But the world despises a dabbler, and the dilettante remains hated for loving, unwanted for wanting.

Actually, that may not be true. For what has the age of the Internet, lifestyle entrepreneurship, and gutted pensions brought us but the exaltation of the non-professional expert and the professional dabbler? An author-turned-publisher-turned-cabinetmaker-turned-contractor friend pointed out to me that there’s probably not a barber, bartender, or small business owner under the age of thirty-seven in any urban centre who doesn’t have a creative writing degree and a stack of unsold hardcore records clogging up their crawl space. A valid argument that demands a modification of my own. Which modification might consist in forcing a distinction between the dilettante and the amateur: I think that passion—driving passion in particular—is importantly absent from the portrait of the dilettante: if we are surrounded by affirming messages exhorting us to “Find the one thing you love more than anything else and do it for the rest of your life” (barf), we less often hear the call to “Find a thing that is interesting and pursue it until your interest is exhausted, I guess” (if there were a little more mingling of these messages, we might have a very different romantic culture, to boot). I am arguing here for the legitimacy of being compelled in a pursuit not by passion per se, or professional dedication, but by appreciation; to be comfortable with something less than mastery of an art or the all-consuming fire of devotion. To quote the etcher, failed poet, part-time essayist, and art historian Philip Gilbert Hamerton, “If the essence of dilettantism is to be contented with imperfect attainment, I fear that all educated people must be considered dilettantes.”3 To make peace with imperfection may be as much a mark of maturity and calmness of spirit as is great diligence and rigour. All of which to say, I think I might try making my own vermouth. Praise be to the bright generalist!