Being Forgotten
Thomas Howard on Male Vanity
I awoke this morning, that is to say, 45 minutes ago, from a dream. Scarcely a Bunyanesque dream, let us hurry to assure everyone. I was at the Hicksite Quaker Meeting at Friends’ School in Moorestown, New Jersey, where I had grown up and gone to school. The time was the present, and I had been gone for 50 years (I left home for boarding school in 1950).
The meeting had been updated, however—like these churches that use movie screens instead of hymnals. There was a brisk conviviality in the ethos not traditional at Quaker Meetings. People nattered away the whole time, even when someone stood up to speak. George Fox, readers will remember, had had the idea that the paradigm for church order, and for the order of public gatherings, was best found by leaving everyone free, upon being “moved by the Spirit,” to stand up and share something. It is to be noted here that “share” was not a seventeenth-century word.
Actually, by Samuel Hicks’s time, the Holy Ghost had himself been jettisoned and this “spirit” might be any impulse in my bosom that prompted me to stand up and descant upon some improving sentiments (what Flannery O’Connor called “uplift”). The sentiments need not imply any theism, God help us all (this is why the Orthodox Quakers had split in the nineteenth century from the Hicksites: It looked as though the latter were heading pell-mell towards Modernism).
But my dream. We sang (the Hicksites do not sing) “For the Beauty of the Earth,” which is safely non-Christological, and “I Love to Tell the Story,” which would be as likely to be sung in a Quaker Meeting as “Rule, Britannia,” and Ubi Caritas, which again, deriving as it does from one of the church fathers (Augustine? Hilary? Theodore of Mopsuestia? I can’t remember), forsooth would not be to Hicksite taste at all.
I noticed that a man several pews in front of me had a copy of the first edition of a book I once wrote. It had (in real life, and in the dream) a canary yellow cover with great craggy lettering dominating the entire dust jacket. “Aha!” thinks I. “They remember me, and I shall be introduced.” And presently the man stood up. I preened myself surreptitiously, ready to respond graciously to the ooh’s and ah’s of the congregation finding their eminent townsman back amongst them.
This part of the dream was a bit skewed: The only common denominator between me and these folks was Moorestown. I had grown up in a fundamentalist conventicle a mile along Main Street from the meeting house at the school, so they would scarcely have felt flattered by this Rip Van Winkle in their midst, even though I had indeed been a small schoolboy in their school.
But the man turned out to have something else to say, and that was the end of that.
A Biting Question
At this point I woke up. The Quakers had no notion as to who I might be, nor much interest in finding out. Which brings us to the topic of the essay: What about oblivion?
This is a question that has more bite in it for a man than for most women. Oh, to be sure, both sexes struggle with various forms of vanity. God knows there are a thousand such forms, ranging from Mme. Pompadour at her toilette to Napoleon and other popinjays strutting the battlements—not to mention the thousandfold daily mutterings of my own heart, e.g., wishing to be frosty to this person, or nursing umbrage over not having been placed at the rear of the line at Baccalaureate with the tenured full professors, which they jolly well ought to know I am.
Thomas Howard taught for many years at St. John's Seminary College, the Roman Catholic seminary of the archdiocese of Boston. Among his many works are the books Christ the Tiger, Evangelical Is Not Enough, Lead Kindly Light, On Being Catholic, and The Secret of New York Revealed, and a videotape series of 13 lectures on "The Treasures of Catholicism" (all from Ignatius Press).
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