`But One Idea'

Since moving to Houston almost three years ago, when I still thought of Texas as the Land of Beef, I have met more vegetarians than at any time in my life. My boss, the neighbors across the street, a librarian, one of my wife’s friends at work, and lately our 6-year-old son have given up meat – in my boss’ case and the neighbors’, for more than 30 years. Their motives are various, involving some mingling of ethics and health. In the mid-seventies I tried vegetarianism for a year or so until a plate of meatballs undid my resolve, so for me it’s a way of life that makes sense even if I’m not willing to adopt it as my own.

While reading William Hazlitt over the weekend, his collection Table-Talk, I came upon “On People with One Idea,” an essay distilled in its title and opening sentence:

“There are people who have but one idea: at least, if they have more, they keep it a secret, for they never talk but of one subject.”

We all know bores, strident button-holers who pin you to the conversational mat with details of their pet enthusiasms. In junior-high school, I had a classmate who committed the Fiddler on the Roof soundtrack to memory and who happily inflicted “If I Were a Rich Man” on innocent bystanders. The true object of Hazlitt’s scorn is not the bore but that sub-class of bores who bore you while trying to convert you to their cause, whether political, religious, culinary or otherwise. Here’s Hazlitt:

“People of the character here spoken of, that is, who tease you to death with some one idea, generally differ in their favourite notion from the rest of the world; and indeed it is the love of distinction which is mostly at the bottom of this peculiarity. Thus, one person is remarkable for living on a vegetable diet, and never fails to entertain you all dinner-time with an invective against animal food. One of this self-denying class, who adds to the primitive simplicity of this sort of food the recommendation of having it in a raw state, lamenting the death of a patient whom he had augered to be in a good way as a convert to his system, at last accounted for his disappointment in a whisper -- `But she ate meat privately, depend upon it.’”

Hazlitt pinpoints the chief motivator of all proselytizing, vegetarian or otherwise – self-righteousness. Proselytizers cannot abide waywardness. Difference is an affront, proof of unworthiness. Proselytizers are morally compelled to set you straight, compounding righteousness with bullying – for many, an irresistibly heady cocktail of emotions. In Cultural Amnesia, Clive James devotes a chapter to Hazlitt, including this digression on prose style I can’t resist quoting:

“Rhythm is never effortless. To achieve it, you must start rewriting in your head and then continue rewriting on the page. The hallmark of a seductive style is to extend natural speech rhythm over the distance of a complex sentence.”

On the subject of bores and proselytizers, however, see James’ chapter on Adolf Hitler. Along with all his other more obvious deformations of character, Hitler must have made for hellishly tedious company. In a digression on Hitler’s obsession with architecture, James writes:

“He had no sense of proportion in any of his ostensibly civilized enthusiasms. His interests lacked the human element, so they could never have amounted to a true humanism.”

To announce the obvious, I’m not equating vegetarians with Hitler, even though Hitler was a sometime vegetarian (but so were Franz Kafka and Isaac Bashevis Singer). My point is that the bore spectrum is broad and varied, from the bullying vegan to the perpetrator of the Holocaust. The mind is bottomless and elastic, able to contain almost anything we feed it. Having only one idea is not a good idea.