I visited with K.C. Thursday evening while watching the Oregon/UCLA game. He gave me permission to post this wry, humorous essay here.Thanks, K.C. This is good stuff.
IN DEFENSE OF BACHELORS
Walter Bagehot, the famed English journalist, once described a bachelor as "a kind of amateur in life who doesn't care." With that slapdash thought Bagehot demoted such luminaries as that singular man from Nazareth, Ludwig van Beethoven, Sir Isaac Newton, Eugene Delacroix, Meriwether Lewis, a horde of Greek philosophers - with the notable exception of hen-pecked Socrates - and countless other genial artisans to the status of secondary life achiever. Can we really think of Giacomo Casanova as a secondary life achiever?
But then Mr. Bagehot was a pre-modern man, a British Victorian whose commentary was at that time was doubtlessly considered insightful and funny by people whose human doings ultimately required child labor laws to be enacted. His idea seems now as epoch bound as King Tut's man tits. I suspect that if we beamed Bagehot forward in time he would appear to us now in the manner of someone like, say…Gore Vidal: word-witty but still an ass (and, I believe, in Mr. Vidal's case, a bachelor ass).
Sorry, Mr. Bagehot: your pronouncement just doesn't jive today, if indeed it ever did. Bachelors in the modern era (we call them "singles) are not so much uninitiated in the rituals of companionship as they are loosed from companionship's rotted moorings. They are, to turn a phrase, significantly un-othered (rhymes moderately with "un-tethered"); in other words, untied and free. Consider for a moment the sound of the cell door clanging in the term, wedlock.
Obviously, vast numbers of men and women seek the safe emotional harbor of belonging to another, that personal leeward anchor from which we shield our tremoring vessel from a weather-beating God. But what does that really point to? Lemmings seek safety, too. We necessarily recognize that at some point every safe harbor is also a prison, and all cargo - even emotional baggage - is subject to being jettisoned when, as Shakespeare's sonnet has it, "nature's changing course untrims."
The majority of my acquaintances and friends have been married (or its illegitimate equivalent) once or twice or thrice; believe me, they are anything but amateurs in life. In fact, quite the opposite. Some of them are virtual professionals at previous bliss. They care immensely about relationships. Perhaps that's why they've had so many. One may well ask why is it that so many bachelors (men and women) find their bachelorhood a culminating event in their lives, a sort of reward for having toiled so in the infertile fields of contemporary companion-seeking. It may be that bachelors consider their single status one of life's honorariums, much like retirement's gold watch or a bonus vacation. Free at last!
"But what of the family unit" cries the shackled masses? I submit that much of what passes as "family values" today is as T. S. Eliot suggested in a not altogether dissimilar context, "better seen in the agony of others than in ourselves." And does anyone really need reminding that those most vocal on behalf of the ultra-familialists are a lynch mob of pandering politicians? Surely this culturally simplistic bleating, this boorishness, is amateurity's epitome
Rather, we should honor those who choose instead to focus on the improvement of the species rather than the ruination of it. We should honor our single siblings because theirs is nothing less than a social awakening infused with actual decency, perhaps even enlightenment itself.
Yes, God truly blesses self-actualizing single. (How else to describe a cartoon free Saturday listening to Boz Scaggs and Mozart, a morning without the need to utter something along the lines of "don't ask so many questions, sweetheart - go back to bed.")
Let us not think of the bachelor as a solitary creature woefully staring at the walls of his cave. He is not that slow beast. Instead, he is socially endowed, frequenting public places and sharing with fellow convivialists (most of whom, married and parental, look to the bachelor for guidance) opinions on a vast array of topics he knows a lot about due to so much uninterrupted time devoted to scholarship. For bachelors are almost always politically astute and culturally aware. You would be hard-pressed, for example, to find a bachelor who is not a devotee of reason. Listen to him discourse on the subject of divorce. Indeed, so many bachelors have first hand knowledge of divorce it would be egregious and unwise not to heed their learned counsel regarding it. And it is important here to remember that the divorce trade, a loose commerce comprised largely of attorney's fees, counseling sessions, and real estate brokers has industry functions along the same lines as long establish commercial enterprises like the Hanseatic League or the Mafia.
Yes, the bachelor, God's intimate emotional traveler, knows a lot about a lot of very important stuff. In fact, heavenly consideration being what it is, if the Inca Civilization had sacrificed bachelors instead of virgins, they might still be in business.
K.C. Bacon
IN DEFENSE OF BACHELORS
Walter Bagehot, the famed English journalist, once described a bachelor as "a kind of amateur in life who doesn't care." With that slapdash thought Bagehot demoted such luminaries as that singular man from Nazareth, Ludwig van Beethoven, Sir Isaac Newton, Eugene Delacroix, Meriwether Lewis, a horde of Greek philosophers - with the notable exception of hen-pecked Socrates - and countless other genial artisans to the status of secondary life achiever. Can we really think of Giacomo Casanova as a secondary life achiever?
But then Mr. Bagehot was a pre-modern man, a British Victorian whose commentary was at that time was doubtlessly considered insightful and funny by people whose human doings ultimately required child labor laws to be enacted. His idea seems now as epoch bound as King Tut's man tits. I suspect that if we beamed Bagehot forward in time he would appear to us now in the manner of someone like, say…Gore Vidal: word-witty but still an ass (and, I believe, in Mr. Vidal's case, a bachelor ass).
Sorry, Mr. Bagehot: your pronouncement just doesn't jive today, if indeed it ever did. Bachelors in the modern era (we call them "singles) are not so much uninitiated in the rituals of companionship as they are loosed from companionship's rotted moorings. They are, to turn a phrase, significantly un-othered (rhymes moderately with "un-tethered"); in other words, untied and free. Consider for a moment the sound of the cell door clanging in the term, wedlock.
Obviously, vast numbers of men and women seek the safe emotional harbor of belonging to another, that personal leeward anchor from which we shield our tremoring vessel from a weather-beating God. But what does that really point to? Lemmings seek safety, too. We necessarily recognize that at some point every safe harbor is also a prison, and all cargo - even emotional baggage - is subject to being jettisoned when, as Shakespeare's sonnet has it, "nature's changing course untrims."
The majority of my acquaintances and friends have been married (or its illegitimate equivalent) once or twice or thrice; believe me, they are anything but amateurs in life. In fact, quite the opposite. Some of them are virtual professionals at previous bliss. They care immensely about relationships. Perhaps that's why they've had so many. One may well ask why is it that so many bachelors (men and women) find their bachelorhood a culminating event in their lives, a sort of reward for having toiled so in the infertile fields of contemporary companion-seeking. It may be that bachelors consider their single status one of life's honorariums, much like retirement's gold watch or a bonus vacation. Free at last!
"But what of the family unit" cries the shackled masses? I submit that much of what passes as "family values" today is as T. S. Eliot suggested in a not altogether dissimilar context, "better seen in the agony of others than in ourselves." And does anyone really need reminding that those most vocal on behalf of the ultra-familialists are a lynch mob of pandering politicians? Surely this culturally simplistic bleating, this boorishness, is amateurity's epitome
Rather, we should honor those who choose instead to focus on the improvement of the species rather than the ruination of it. We should honor our single siblings because theirs is nothing less than a social awakening infused with actual decency, perhaps even enlightenment itself.
Yes, God truly blesses self-actualizing single. (How else to describe a cartoon free Saturday listening to Boz Scaggs and Mozart, a morning without the need to utter something along the lines of "don't ask so many questions, sweetheart - go back to bed.")
Let us not think of the bachelor as a solitary creature woefully staring at the walls of his cave. He is not that slow beast. Instead, he is socially endowed, frequenting public places and sharing with fellow convivialists (most of whom, married and parental, look to the bachelor for guidance) opinions on a vast array of topics he knows a lot about due to so much uninterrupted time devoted to scholarship. For bachelors are almost always politically astute and culturally aware. You would be hard-pressed, for example, to find a bachelor who is not a devotee of reason. Listen to him discourse on the subject of divorce. Indeed, so many bachelors have first hand knowledge of divorce it would be egregious and unwise not to heed their learned counsel regarding it. And it is important here to remember that the divorce trade, a loose commerce comprised largely of attorney's fees, counseling sessions, and real estate brokers has industry functions along the same lines as long establish commercial enterprises like the Hanseatic League or the Mafia.
Yes, the bachelor, God's intimate emotional traveler, knows a lot about a lot of very important stuff. In fact, heavenly consideration being what it is, if the Inca Civilization had sacrificed bachelors instead of virgins, they might still be in business.
K.C. Bacon
TS
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